Of New Year resolutions, literature and well being

“One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me... He told me that he was confused, that he was having terrible moments of weariness, of dissatisfaction, perhaps of cowardice. He talked for a long time about our fifteen years of marriage, about the children, and admitted that he had nothing to reproach us with, neither them nor me. He… explained to me, with a childish frown, that soft voices, a sort of whispering, were urging him elsewhere. Then he… closed the front door carefully behind him, leaving me turned to stone beside the sink.

“I spent the night thinking, desolate in the big double bed. No matter how much I examined and re-examined the recent phases of our relationship, I could find no real signs of crisis… I was in love with him: as I listened, my veins contracted, my skin froze. I was cold, he was gone, I stood at the stone parapet below Sant’ Elmo looking at the faded city, the sea… later he telephoned me in embarrassment, justified himself, said that there had come upon him a sudden absence of sense,” so wrote Elena Ferrante in her fiery novel Days of Abandonment, an angry but riveting dialogue on a failing marriage.

It's worth reading Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment because as the New Year 2024 starts, most Kenyans yearn for meaningful, purposeful, and connected lives. However, like the abandoned wife, what most people experience is often turbulence. In the quoted passage, a housewife is dealing with abandonment after the husband leaves their matrimonial home for life with a younger woman. Ferrante delves into the “abandoned-wife archetype”, a trope that dates as far back as ancient Greece and classic Russian literature (especially Tolstoy’s famed Anna Karenina). Ferrante deals with the seductive areas where men pursue things they know may destroy them but do it anyway as they stand on the precipice of ruin. The narrative arc paints an atmosphere of household tension and of unnamed, dark, subterranean undercurrents.

What stuns the wife is that she thought the husband was happy in their “paradise”. The wife (narrator) says, “We had moved a few months earlier to Turin….(into) a beautiful house overlooking the river… It was pleasant to watch the seasons from the balcony of our house... In the spring a fresh, sparkling breeze came from the river, animating the new shoots, the branches of the trees”.

But like in all tragedies, there was trouble in “paradise”. And sometimes literature is about paradise lost. A teenage girl jumps over the fence and disappears. A man leaves his wife and children behind and never looks back. A housewife takes the money meant for groceries, takes a taxi and disappears for good. We live in a society with people hidden behind masks. Lives portrayed on social media as perfect and then disaster strikes and we wonder, “but they looked very happy”.

What Ferrante does in her novel Days of Abandonment is to peel the mask and reveal the authentic state of the marriage as portrayed in the narrative. After the husband leaves, the woman descends into shock, numbness and despair. One lesson from the novel that Kenyans can take a way is that it’s good to have time for retrospection and reflection. The woman asks herself, “Where was I coming from, what was I becoming?”

And this is a good time to reflect on our lives as we make New Year resolutions for 2024. One of the books that Kenyans may find helpful is Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living by Shauna Niequist. Shauna’s motto is “how to live a rich, engaged, and loving life in the midst of what often feels terribly messy and imperfect”. “Present over perfect” is a good New Year resolution.

In the preface to the book Present Over Perfect, the famous author Brené Brown describes an encounter with the author (Shauna) when they met. Brené writes that Shauna asked her, “‘How are you?’ I could tell she really wanted to know. I got teary eyed and said, ‘I’m tired. Confused. A little lonely. But holding on.’ Shauna smiled as her eyes welled up. ‘Me too, pal. Me too. It’s so hard sometimes.’” This is very touching because most people do not admit, even to family members, that they are struggling and this exacerbates depression. We should seek help when we are not well whether mentally, emotionally or otherwise. It’s okay not be okay.

As we work hard, we should also learn to slow down to recharge. Shauna writes in Present Over Perfect that this is an art she had to learn, “My life is marked now by quiet, connection, simplicity. It has taken every bit of more than three years to learn these things, and like any hard, good work, I fail and try again more often than I’d prefer. But there is a peace that defines my days, a settledness, a groundedness. I’ve been searching for this in a million places, all outside myself, and it astounds me to realize that the groundedness is within me, and that maybe it was there all along”.

When others need us this year, may we be concerned with being present over perfect.

The writer is a book publisher based in Nairobi. [email protected]