Do you think his midlife crisis, for lack of a better term, was inevitable, after thirty years of dutiful, subservient marriage, or is this something psychologically stranger?
This spare, fable-like novella tells the story of three generations of a Sardinian family, centering on an eccentric woman, referred to simply as "grandmother," who, in the years following the Second World War, pursues a brief but enthralling affair with a disfigured veteran before returning to her dutiful, passionless marriage and a "life of ashes after that one spark".
Their marriage is dutiful, doomed, yet perpetual, a "conspiracy of experience".
Here is love in several guises: affairs in rented rooms and city parks; unrequited devotion, nurtured at a distance; marriages both dutiful and sophisticated.
Therein, Prof. Foxy counselled a newly married woman who dutifully practiced abstinence until marriage, only to find that married sex wasn't as magically blissful as the abstinence-only crowd had led her to believe.
Akhtar led a double life, playing the dutiful son with an arranged marriage in the £350,000 home he was given as a wedding gift by his family, and working in his family's clothing firm empire.
"As complications branched out in my life, as my approach to my marriage became more dutiful and formal, I decided that the theory of the unified personality was a fiction," Taylor writes.
You come away from the book with a powerful image of the ambitious artist trapped in a suffocating marriage, even as Knausgaard dutifully interrogates the meaning of ambition, art and marriage.
The last time we met, I asked Misal about his romantic affairs and was surprised that, for all his daring, he was a dutiful Indian son on the question of marriage.
In his attempts to help Henry regain his faith and belief that he can make a difference in the lives of his parishioners, Dudley feels that Henry first must realize he's letting his marriage to the beautiful and dutiful Julia (Houston) suffer.
