Italian Learning Log #2
Salem’s Lot / Le Notti di Salem
Over the last seven days I finished my first novel written for adults in my L2. The book I went for was Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot’, or ‘Le Notti di Salem’. I wanted to read something by him for a while, because I always saw him as the master of pulp fiction, with a ferocious work ethic and an aptitude for spinning stories impromptu. I wanted a story and nothing else, and hopefully one in which the plot would force me to understand the thing, despite all the blank spots in comprehension. A Stephen King book about vampires ticked all the boxes.
It was reassuring in that King was keen to show that the book was written to horrify and entertain in a straightforward sort of way. His protagonist, Ben, (whom Stephen King alludes may be his cameo), reproaches his girlfriend, Susan, for arguing that a novel might be improved with a positive moral message. King is loyal to all the vampire tropes available — only bats were absent — and there is a variety of gruesome scenes and grotesque characters, for instance Dud, a lustful hunchback estranged by his family, who lives in the rubbish dump, devising different methods to kill rats in his pastime. ‘Le Notti di Salem’ was evidently a tribute to Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ and it deserves a place in any list e devoted to the genre.
The plot is engaging and it picks up early on and starts moving rapidly at an exponential rate, thanks in part to the characters believing what they see and hear and not soliciting help from the outside world. It’s apparent where the story is going and I didn’t expect nor receive any surprises.
King must have had a particularly frightening childhood because he has a morbid fascination of the psychology of fear, a fear that fades with age as the potency of imagination subsides. He speaks of a crippling fear, a fear much worse than the prospect of a divorce, losing your job or being caught drinking again, a fear his characters vaguely recall from their childhood, trembling in the darkness with bedsheets pulled over their faces. Mark, ten years old, lies horrified in his bed every night for weeks, as his classmate, brought back from the grave, goads him from outside, begging Mark to open the window. He can’t ask his parents for help, because he knows they won’t believe him.
Le Notti di Salem is about an impossible fear in a rational world, and King wants to us to be grateful for our safety and central heating. Callahan, the drunk Catholic priest, suffering from a spiritual crisis, believes that the traditional idea of evil has been extinguished. He bemoans the retreat of the Church, a result of the enlightenment and Freud’s subconsciousness. Satan was once a physical being, flesh and bone, but over the years has been reduced to an abstract, a shade on the tapestry of the human condition. And whereas the clergymen were once a barricade against demons and monsters, the Church now exists as a symbol and a form of therapy, ever capitulating to an increasingly flexible concept of morality. Darkness once meant predators and potential death, immutable, today it can be can be repelled with a switch.
As an exercise
There were some great lines throughout the story, some quite descriptive or metaphorical, which I had to wrestle with, but the moment of comprehension was always an ‘aha’ moment followed by a sense of achievement. And here lies the compensation that can be derived from reading a book in your TL. Inherent to reading native material beyond your level (of which almost all of it will be) are long periods of incomprehensibility, and the knowledge that you could read the same thing considerably faster in your mother tongue and understand it perfectly. This will gnaw at your motivation and leave you asking yourself why you are spending large portions of your time staring at pages and pages of near-gibberish. But when you manage to discern the meaning of a sentence you can praise yourself, knowing that that sentence is a genuine extract of target language, that hasn’t been simplified for a text book or composed with a handful of the 1,000 most frequent words.
I found myself skimming through significant sections of the book, looking at the words, but no more than that, the words sinking no deeper than my vision, until I noticed something I could easy understand (this tends to be dialogue or simple plot events) and reigning down on it. Regaining my confidence I would press forward and when the text became difficult again I would lose concentration. Throughout the book the periods of comprehensibility and concentration grew as the stretches of incomprehensibility shrank.
Looking up more than, say, 10 words per page for example can be tedious and goes against a lot of advice. But from my experience, the more dictionary work you put in the better. After each reading session I would check the underlined words and add them to Anki. As you progress through the book, although many of these words might never appear again, some of them do, and the chance you have of encountering comprehensible sentences is massively compounded. The combination of a series of reviews on Anki and encountering the word in active immersion is powerful and highly conducive for actual acquisition of the word.
When choosing a foreign language novel it seems intuitive to go for a short one, in that short books are less daunting with the end always in sight. But I would advise anyone considering on taking the plunge with their first L2 novel to pick out a long book. This way you can tolerate periods of ambiguity without feeling like you are missing out on too big a portion of the narrative, and it gives you time to settle into the author’s style and register. Moreover, you progress you build up more of a background in the world of the story, and with 300 pages behind you, your chance of discerning the meaning from a difficult sentence rises.
Log:
This week, I finished one book (650 pages) and watched the following:
Castlevania S1: 1 hour 30 minutes
Barbari S1: 5 hours
Various radio and podcasts (can’t time it)
Total: 21 hours 30 minutes listening + 650 pages reading
Doesn’t seem like much at all, but I am struggling to find any series I can get stuck into. The only thing I really want to watch is The Wire, but it would be a shame not to watch an American cult of such clout in its original language. I also started Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, but ended up putting it down because the unknown words started to get too frequent.
