Whereas I do feel that Russell purposefully chose the worst outcome for her characters, even the survivors, not because it served the narrative but because it was satisfying to her as an author. As a reader, I felt that she enjoyed the pain a little too much.
It did not feel as obvious to me that she enjoyed it as opposed to merely believing it the most authentic and inevitable outcome, but either way I didn't like it.
(It's also part of the problem with her coin-flip strategy of character survival: if she really implemented it as described, then the element of random chance had doomed nearly her entire main cast by the end of the novel, meaning that assigning a bitter ending to one of the very few characters not to have canonically snuffed it in wartime—and the only one to be tracked by the narrative into the present day—concentrates the sense of futility differently than if more of the characters had lived to represent a wider array of post-war options. I agree with you that it undermines the stated sentiment of celebrating the Italian partisans and underground. I think it might have been fine to flip the coin for the first draft, but keeping it as a final authority over the fates of her characters is one of the reasons the novel feels so well, that happened shapeless to me.)
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Date: 2023-10-24 05:45 am (UTC)It did not feel as obvious to me that she enjoyed it as opposed to merely believing it the most authentic and inevitable outcome, but either way I didn't like it.
(It's also part of the problem with her coin-flip strategy of character survival: if she really implemented it as described, then the element of random chance had doomed nearly her entire main cast by the end of the novel, meaning that assigning a bitter ending to one of the very few characters not to have canonically snuffed it in wartime—and the only one to be tracked by the narrative into the present day—concentrates the sense of futility differently than if more of the characters had lived to represent a wider array of post-war options. I agree with you that it undermines the stated sentiment of celebrating the Italian partisans and underground. I think it might have been fine to flip the coin for the first draft, but keeping it as a final authority over the fates of her characters is one of the reasons the novel feels so well, that happened shapeless to me.)