I didn’t know that until I saw his post in my own reading, I kept thinking of the German anderes, meaning other.
Sergei pointed out that the name Anders, a common Swedish name, is derived from the Greek for man. Instead, she just seems to have a low but incessant unease about how the life she has chosen for herself fits into the larger cultural construction of womanhood. But it’s also not as though Marina is clamoring to get pregnant. Marina is acutely aware of being childless as she approaches the Eckman family home, she thinks about her financial situation with a sort of abject confusion, seemingly having trouble coming up with a reason she has disposable income when she doesn’t have children to support. Swenson’s research, says to Marina, “You can always have children.” He is using the generic “you” here, meaning any woman at all, but Marina feels as if he’s talking to her. One of the most powerful moments in this section comes when Anders, rhapsodizing about the potential implications of Dr. When Karen calls Marina in the middle of the night to confess her wholly uninformed uncertainty as to whether her husband is actually dead, she is enacting her own version of Marina’s recurring nightmare: where is he? The first section of the book, to me, feels shot through with anxieties about men possessing a capacity for self-determination–namely, the ability to leave–that women, the bearers and nurturers of children, are denied.Īnd so we come to Marina’s feelings about her own lack of hometown responsibilities. Why? To look at birds, a ready symbol of freedom, of being untethered. While it wasn’t, obviously, Anders’s choice to become deathly ill in the Amazon, he wanted to make the trip to Brazil in the first place. Anders, like Marina’s father, has gone to another country and left his family bereft.
Specifically, the nightmares helped me understand that Marina feels that she and Karen are kindred spirits in many ways. For me, the narrative of Marina’s abandonment by her father was crucial to fully engaging with Marina’s sense of emotional entanglement with Karen Eckman following the news of Anders’s death. As the first section of the book unfolds, we learn that Marina’s childhood trips to visit her (largely absentee) father in India were accompanied by a recurring dream of being separated from him in a crowd. In his first post about State of Wonder, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky posed a series of questions about Marina’s nightmares.
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