Steven J. Kolbe Classic Corner, Humorous, Literary fiction, Post-modernism, Reading

Immortality by Milan Kundera: Review

While everyone was falling in and out of love with Kundera in the 1980s, I was learning how to moo like a cow, oink like a pig, baa like a sheep, so you’ll have to forgive me for coming to this, the last of Kundera’s “middle period novels” so late in the game. Fortunately, as its title implies, Immortality is a complex, nuanced novel of enduring relevance, for while we may not all be obsessed with the life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and running off to Switzerland, we do all ruminate from time to time on our own mortality and what it says about our actions in this single fleeting lifetime.

While awaiting his friend, Professor Avenarius, Kundera observes a woman in the pool of his health club. Though she is in her sixties, as she leaves she waves at the life guard in a manner that makes Kundera feel a pang in his heart: “That smile and that gesture belonged to a twenty-year-old girl! Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly colored ball to her lover” (3). He assigns her a name, Agnes, and for the next three hundred pages, he invents for her a story: how she first developed the wave as a girl, how her sister, Laura, stole the gesture and how, after her death, her husband Paul performs it for us one final time.

Interspersed between the nonlinear narrative sections are two different elements: (a) a literary biography of Goethe, which focuses on his relationship with Bettina von Arnim, (b) and metafictional sections in which the author himself discusses the novel he is writing (this novel) with his good friend Avenarius.

Goethe

What do the literary biography sections add? How do they move the narrative forward? In one sense, they don’t. During one discussion with Avenarius, Kundera decries novels that are too obedient to “the rules of unity of action,” labeling dramatic tension the “real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most beautiful pages…into steps leading to the final resolution” (238) rather than moments to be savored as one would savor a delicious meal. In this light, we read the biography not for plot but for theme. While Goethe doesn’t appear in the events of the novel, we see parallels from his life in the actions of Paul, himself an intellectual with his own radio show full of complex ideas and words “the whole staff would afterward secretly look up in the dictionary” (119); while Bettina contributes nothing to the story, her gestures and intentions are reincarnated in Laura as she attempts to steal Paul from her sister in the same manner that Bettina attempted to steal Goethe from Frau Goethe. Through these parallels, Kundera develops his ideas on both identity and individuality. What does Bettina’s unique and innocent independence mean if it can be imitated a century later? Then there is the sexual ambiguity both Laura and Bettina employ and for the same advantage. If these strategies of coquetry are so universal, then how ambiguous could they really be?

The biographical sections also reinforce two structural elements: (a) that this is a work of metafiction in which the author and his thoughts will be inserted directly, and (b) that it is nonlinear, for even the biography of Goethe jumps forward and backward, focusing on major themes rather than plot, in the way literary analysis tends to do.

Metafiction

As Kundera reminds us throughout the novel, these characters aren’t real. After all, it is no great coincidence they’re lives contain so many parallels to the life of Goethe. However, what the narrator cannot tell us, for he lacks the self-awareness to do so, is that he too is a construct, the narrator-Kundera that the real-Kundera has invented to serve in his stead. Such is the nature of all metafiction: even the character who declares him or herself the creator is still contained within the work itself, is still being written by someone else unseen.

This is made most explicitly evident in the closing section when Kundera and Avenarius (a real colleague or a reincarnation of positivist German-Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius?) find themselves “standing face to face with Paul” (333) at the very same health club where Kundera invented Agnes. Paul has lost his wife, he’s struggled to raise their daughter with the help of his new wife, Laura, but everything is not smooth sailing. It is here with the merging of these two worlds that we finally understand (if we haven’t already) just how fictional Kundera is and his conversations with Avenarius. We knew that Agnes’ Switzerland and Paul’s radio station were fictional, but this too? Ah, metafiction, the truth that tells a lie!

Gestures

Flowing entirely from a single gesture–Agnes waving as she leaves the pool–this is certainly a novel of gestures. Again and again, we are directed to the idea of gesture as identity: in the girlish wave, in the dark glasses, in the hereditary expressions of Paul’s face, in the oppression of the imagologues, and finally in the “gesture of longing for immortality” that drives so many of the actions in the novel.

Each character longs for the kind of legacy left by great works of brilliance, charity, love, while avoiding the infamy that often accompanies it. This dichotomy is made starkly apparent in the sections dedicated to the ghosts of Goethe and Ernest Hemingway. There in the afterlife, Hemingway complains about the attention he now receives. “Instead of reading my books, they’re writing books about me.” The critics accuse him of not loving his wife, ignoring his son, lying, lacking sincerity, and other moral failings. Goethe responds, “That’s immortality…[It] means eternal trial” (87). With attention comes scrutiny. Though both men are remembered for their superhuman work, they’re also remembered for their very human failings, just as the author-narrator no doubt will be.

Conclusion

All novels tell us have to read them. This I firmly believe. An author uses structure, genre, and repetition to signal the reader. In metafiction, the author does this even more directly. In the end, Immortality, is an analysis of itself, commenting on the characters the way a literary analysis would and critiquing itself as it builds itself, but by taking a step back, we can see it is also simpler than that. It is a novel about a novelist. Here is his life, recorded linearly; here is his friend Avenarius with whom he discusses his work as he is writing it; here is all of his inspiration presented in the scattered, fragmented, and nonlinear way that novels present themselves to their creators. It just so happens that Kundera (the character) gets to meet his creations in real-life at the end.

Steven J. Kolbe Classic Corner, Literary fiction, Reading

Review: The Joke by Milan Kundera

Told through four alternating points-of-view, Kundera’s 1967 debut follows the repercussions of a joke told by an undergraduate student in soviet-occupied Czechoslovakian. Kundera draws on three traditions: the senseless labyrinth of fellow Czech writer Franz Kafka, the satirical works produced by citizens of and refugees from the Soviet Union, and the revenge tragedy in which the hero is hoisted by his own petard.

Kafkaesque

Kundera signals Kafka most directly in his Ludvik sections. After Ludvik Jahn sends a post card to a fellow member of the communist party, jovially mocking her over-enthusiasm, his life becomes a series of trials and interrogations, which result in his expulsion from the party and the university and his conscription into an unarmed military brigade whose main responsibilities include working in the mines. It is hard labor and every step he takes to disentangle himself from the title of “enemy of the state” only confirms his guilt more in the eyes of his superiors. If he works extra hard, it is because he is a capitalist looking for an advantage. If he tries to enjoy his comrades, it is only because they are just as evil as he is and as much despised. The “soldiers” are run ragged, first in the mines and then in weaponless drills that make no sense and prepare them for no battles.

Kostka faces similar trials. A Christian and a party member, he is integral during the days of the revolution when the party seeks to attract church-goers, but later his faith is viewed as suspicious. Cast out of the university as well, Kostka embraces a post at a state farm, not out of obedience to his party but out of his devotion to Christ, which drives him to seek out the lowly and offer them help.

Soviet Dystopia

In the same tradition as Yevgeny Petrov’s Twelve Chairs, The Joke satirizes the ridiculous unintended consequences of the communist system while also demonstrating the real damage it causes.

Hardly a character or ideal is left unharmed by the tyrannical system imposed on Czechoslovakia. Kostka’s religion is ridiculed, then suspected, and finally it ends his career at the state farm. Not his actions but his beliefs are his undoing. Similarly, Jaroslav finds his folk traditions, his love of Czech music and history, reduced to kitsch pageantry, the music appropriated in order to propagate communist ideas and deify soviet heroes. For Ludvik it is ideas in themselves that are attacked: free speech and the ability to make light of any and everything are outlawed under the soviet system. Ludvik cannot even make a joke about the comical zeal with which his classmates revere the communism and this is in itself his entire undoing. Because he dares to make light of the enthusiasm of his friend, his future is robbed from him.

Revenge Gone Wrong

In addition to a critique of the communist party and a contemplation of how Czech society has changed in the decades since the revolution, Kundera’s novel is also a revenge story. Ludvik cannot let go of the wrongs done to him by his classmates, his party, and his country. So when he sees an opportunity to avenge himself through the wife of his former inquisitor, he jumps at the chance. He schemes and connives and reduces the wife to a means to an end just as he was reduced by the state. In the end, the hatred he has reserved for others for two decades festers in his own heart. His revenge, when it comes, is crueler and more heart-breaking but, inevitably, less effective than we ever could’ve expected.

Steven J. Kolbe Classic Mysteries, Literary fiction, Post-modernism

City of Glass: The New York Trilogy, Book One

Who is Daniel Quinn? That may be the central mystery in Paul Auster’s first installment of his New York Trilogy, City of Glass. Identity and language are of the utmost importance to the novel from the very beginning, often taking precedence over the stated mystery.

Chapter one opens in Quinn’s apartment in “the dead of night” when a wrong number draws Daniel Quinn into a strange situation, and it is this story, the narrator assures us, that matters, not Quinn. “Who he was, where he came from, and what he did are of no great importance,” we are told, yet the narrator proceeds to tell us a great deal about Quinn, how he has lost his wife and his son, how he is a mystery writer using the pseudonym William Wilson, and how he only writes mystery novels because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Though his pen-name is attributed, much later, to the Mets centerfielder who goes by William “Mookie” Wilson (129) there is the obvious reference to the founder of the Alcoholic’s Anonymous, “Bill” Wilson. Though the narrator never makes this allusion directly, Quinn certainly resembles the advocate of anonymity more than the fielder of fly balls, hiding as he does in complete obscurity:


No book by William Wilson ever included an author’s photograph or biographical note. William Wilson was not listed in any writers’ directory, he did not give interviews, and all the letters he received were answered by his agent’s secretary.

(5)

Even before the wrong number (read: mistaken identity), Quinn is an enigma. This is complicated even further by the hero of the novels he writes, “private-eye narrator Max Work,” who suffers beatings and is confronted with elaborate puzzles but always prevails. Max Work presents a third identity for Quinn. “In the triad of selves that Quinn had become,” the narrator asserts, “Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist. Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise” (7). If prose is a transcription of thoughts, a crystallization of the ephemeral mind onto paper, then whose thoughts does Max Work narrate–Quinn’s, Wilson’s, or his own? In the hard-boiled narratives Quinn writes, his own thoughts and experiences are translated twice–first through the lens of genre concerns for which he created Wilson and then through the lens of the story itself which Wilson created Work to embody.

It is after establishing all of this that Quinn answers the phone call, the wrong number. An anonymous voice, whispering to faintly to be distinguished as male or female, asks, “Is this Paul Auster…Of the Paul Auster Detective Agency?” (7) And now that the author himself has entered the text by reference if not in person, our minds are wrenched out of comprehension even further. What is this thing we are reading and who is Quinn if he is being mistaken for Auster? But, of course, we know already: before Quinn invented William Wilson to write mystery novels, Paul Auster created Quinn–but to what end? The narrator assures us it is to the same end as Quinn’s invention of Wilson–to tell a mystery story–but even now we know better than to trust the narrator who, after all, is also a tool of Auster’s.

If we’re still not convinced this is a narrative about narrative, Auster presents the crime: Peter Stillman is a man raised in complete isolation by his unhinged theology professor father (also named Peter) in an attempt to better understand language. The younger explains:

The father talked about God. He wanted to know if God had a language…The father thought a baby might speak it if the baby saw no people. But what baby was there? Ah. Now you begin to see.

(20)

This absence of language and human interaction leaves him awkward, stilted, and subhuman. His wife Virginia fears that Peter’s father, about to be released from a mental hospital, plans to return and kill his son who he now calls a “devil boy.” Under the guise of Paul Auster, Quinn accepts the case.

The task is simple: to locate the elder Peter Stillman and tail him, but nothing about this mystery is simple. Like Quinn, Stillman has multiple identities: the Columbia professor, the fictitious Miltonic pamphleteer, Henry Dark, and finally the madman. When Quinn finally locates Stillman, he is doubled:

Directly behind Stillman, heaving into view just inches behind his right shoulder, another man stopped, took a lighter out of his pocket, and lit a cigarette. His face was the exact twin of Stillman’s…The second Stillman had a prosperous air about him.

(55-56)

Quinn must choose between the prosperous and the shabby incarnations–the madman and the businessman–knowing “there was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake” (56). He chooses the shabby Stillman and descends with him into madness and homelessness, recording all of it in his red spiral notebook, the same type of notebook he uses to draft his mystery novels.

At this point the narrator, who we assumed was a third-person omniscient voice, enters the story in the flesh. “I returned home from my trip to Africa in February,” he says. “I called my friend Auster that evening, and he urged me to come over to see him as soon as I could” (132). Auster, we learn, is not a private detective but a writer (read: another case of mistaken identity). After meeting Daniel Quinn, he has closely followed the Stillman case. The narrator accompanies Auster to find Quinn but manages only to find the red notebook:

I have followed the red notebook as closely as I could and any inaccuracies in the story should be blamed on me. There were moments when the text was difficult to decipher, but I have done my best with it and have refrained from any interpretations.

(133)

In this final chapter then, two elements are added: an additional identity for Auster (the unnamed narrator we’ve taken to be the real Auster all along but who has emerged as a new character) and an additional lens (that of the “found story”) through which we are to view the story. While the “found story” technique added a layer of authenticity to tales of the 19th century, here is only draws more conspicuous attention to the artificiality of this text.

If we are to believe that the heart of any novel is some central mystery, then what is the nature of that mystery in contemporary fiction? Again and again, authors of literary fiction turn to psychological ones: who is the protagonist? What is the essence of their identity and how did they come to develop it? The identity of Daniel Quinn, I would wager, is the central mystery of City of Glass, except Auster explores it not through the realistic, interior-focused techniques of literary fiction but through the twisting, exterior-focused ones of the mystery genre. I am curious to see what the central mystery of book two, Ghosts, will be.

Steven J. Kolbe Literary fiction, Reading

GoodReads: What, Why, How

Sometime in high school, I developed the idea that what I needed more than anything was a book collection. My first personal library, not composed of picture books given to me by my parents but ones carefully cultivated myself, began on a small shelf in my closet. The shelf, most likely designed for shoes, was the perfect size for the various pocket-sized novels, plays, and poetry collections I’d either been assigned to read at school or purchased from the local Books-a-Million. Little by little, my collection of Shakespeare and Frost and George Orwell grew.

By the end of high school, I’d amassed a respectable library, but more important, I had realized that the key was READING widely and not just owning a lot of books. My reading record began on a word document that I updated regularly so that I wouldn’t forget about all those books I’d checked out from the library or borrowed from teachers or friends.

At some point, to my dismay, I lost that document! Computers don’t last forever and in those days if you wanted to transfer information, you needed a flash drive. (We didn’t have the luxury of Google Docs back then.)

Thankfully, I soon discovered GoodReads. GR is a website/app that helps readers keep track or what they read and find what to read next. It also enables them to leave reviews and ratings for others.

I cannot stress enough how helpful this is, not just for readers but for authors.

Word of mouth: Every time someone posts a rating or a review or even a “want-to-read” status, their GR friends and followers receive a notification, giving that author free advertising, and the best kind. I don’t know about you, but most of the books I have read and loved have been recommended to me by a friend, a family member, or a teacher, not a celebrity book club or a “must-read” list.

Promotions: Authors are constantly running promotions, such as Robin Reads and BookBub. In order to qualify for many of these, books have to have awards, come from a “big five” publisher, or be well reviewed. GoodReads is one of the places these companies look.

Accounts are free and easy to set up. You can even use your Facebook, Amazon, or Apple account: https://www.goodreads.com/user/sign_up

If you do set up an account or have one already, look for my author page here!

Have a book or author I absolutely need to check out? Drop a GoodReads link in the comments!

Steven J. Kolbe Classic Corner, Literary fiction, Post-modernism

Review: Six Memos for the Next Millennium

In 1985, Italian novelist Italo Calvino delivered a series of lectures at Harvard University. His topic? The future of the novel. Six Memos for the Next Millennium explores five topics relevant to the novelist of today—lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity—and an unwritten discussion on consistency.

Lightness

For this first essay, Calvino draws inspiration from the story of Perseus and Medusa and the play of heaviness and lightness the story contains. The sight of Medusa induces petrifaction, yet the droplets of blood the drip from her severed head produce the Pegasus, an ultimate symbol of lightness. He then juxtaposes two Roman writers, Lucretius and Ovid, the prior of whom explores the atomic nature of reality, the seemingly solid world “composed of unalterable atoms” (11) while the latter concerns himself with external forms that change at a whim—from woman to lotus tree, from Arachne to spider—because of the mythological common substance inside all things. One author finds lightness through scientific inquiry, the other through the fables of myth. He also juxtaposes two Italian poets, Guido Cavalcanti whose vagueness he prefers over Dante Alighieri’s concreteness, comparing a phrase written by Cavalcanti and then altered by Dante: “e bianca neve scender senza venti” (and white snow falling on a windless day) which becomes in Dante’s Inferno “come di neve in alpe sanza vento” (like snow on mountains on a windless day) (17). The distinction of mountain versus air is minute but important to Calvino. The final image, one Shakespeare returns to again and again, is the moon, that object of light that is ever changing and conceals as much as it reveals. Calvino believes literature shouldn’t accurately represent the weight of the world but should instead serve as a magic carpet, as Kafka’s flying bucket or, to return to the original image, as the Pegasus, taking us up and away into the realm of the imagination.

Quickness

This essay begins with a discussion of an old French legend: Charlemagne falling in love with a German girl and becoming heartbroken after her death. Calvino discusses several versions, but concludes that the most straightforward is the best. It takes us from A to B in the most interesting way, implying what is uninteresting and implying through juxtaposition of scenes additional causation and meaning. This is not to say all writers should just skip to the end. “The story is a horse,” he writes, “a means of transport, with a particular gait—trot or gallop—depending on the route to be traveled” (47). He concludes this talk with another story, this time of Chinese origin. In it, a gifted artist, Zhuang Zhou, is asked by the king to draw a crab. He requests five years for the task, then another five years. He requires space and servants. The king obliges and obliges. At the end of the tenth year, “Zhuang Zhou took his brush and in an instant, with a single flourish, drew a crab, the most perfect crab anyone had ever seen” (65). I sometimes become a slave to the act of writing, to producing pages, when I should be conceptualizing what exactly it should look like.

Exactitude

“Literature—by which I mean literature that responds to these demands—is the Promised Land in which language becomes what it truly ought to be.” (68)

Visibility

More than any of the others, this talk deals with the nature of artistic inspiration, the realm of both the muses and the Holy Spirit, of psychology and ideology, of Apollo and Dionysus. In the way Calvino covers both Christianity and Greek Mythology, Dante and Felix the Cat, in “Visibility” does he most remind me of Nietzsche. This discussion could very easily be read as a response or addendum to The Birth of Tragedy, which juxtaposes two varieties of artistic inspiration—Apollo’s orderly rationality and Dionysus’ passionate irrationality. In the end, he finds both impulses in Honore de Balzac, who mid-career “rejects the literature of the fantastic, which for him has meant art as mystical knowledge of everything, and he undertakes the minute description of the world as it is, still convinced he is expressing the secret of life” (119). The degree to which a novelist leans toward Giordano Bruno’s spiritus phantsticus (fantastic spirit), with its infinite well of imagination, or Balzac’s Comedie humaine (human comedy), with its near infinite reality of details, determines how they will attempt to capture the universe: through possibility or through probability. Either way, the individual author is creating a new novel and offering it to the body of literature, bridging “exteriority and interiority, world and self, experience and imagination.” Calvino finds his ultimate truth not in the novel as isolated construction but The Novel as shared idea, a universal body of novels. “These pages of signs,” he concludes, “as dense as grains of sand, represent the variegated spectacle of the world upon a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes driven by the desert wind” (121).

Multiplicity

Drawing from two engineers-turned-writers, Carlo Emilio Gadda (Italian) and Robert Musil (German), Calvino demonstrates how two writers with similar backgrounds can develop opposing philosophies and approaches to the novel. Gadda represents a “tension between rational exactitude and frenetic deformation” while Musil’s writing is “fluid, ironic, controlled” (133). Both inhabit the same space, where mathematical rationality meets the roughness of human affairs, but in completely different ways. Here we find perhaps the most literary references to contemporary and near-contemporary authors, from Flaubert and Proust to Borges and Georges Perec. In the tight constraints of Oulipo Calvino finds his answer to the future of literature, quoting Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau, “Le classique qui ecrit sa tragedie en observant un certain nombre de regles qu’il connait est plus libre que le poete qui ecrit ce qui lui passe par la tete et qui est l’esclave d’autres regles qu’il ignore.” (The classical author who is writing his tragedy follows a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes down whatever comes into his head and who is a slave to other rules of which he is unaware.) (150-51). Or as Frost put it, “writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net.” While there is certainly freedom in exploration and experimentation with forms, abandonment of all constraints is itself a kind of imprisonment.

Consistency

Above the door in my classroom hangs a sign, one foot by three feet, which says simply “Consistency.” I put it there my second year and have been striving toward that ideal ever since. Ironically, the closer I get to it the more I am repelled from it. Every class, every student, every day poses a different set of variables. If I were truly consistent, I would no doubt miss countless opportunities. So it also seems fitting that instead of ending with the last of the six essays, Calvino leaves that talk unwritten. In a sense, consistency as an ideal would contradict all that he laid out before it. If the novels of Balzac from Le Chef-d’oeuvre Inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece) to his Comedie Humaine teach us anything it is that an author is not a monolith and shouldn’t strive to be one. Perhaps Calvino left off the final topic because he knew that the natural variety within each of us is far greater than any consistency imposed from without. Or he just forgot.

Steven J. Kolbe Literary fiction, Post-modernism, Real Life

On Publishing Stories

I received my first print publication of a short story last month—six months after my debut novel came out. Read “The Opening of a New Spy Novel by an Author You Love” online at Calliope on the Web. Fans of post-modernism, especially the work of Italo Calvino, will find much to enjoy.

I was always told to focus on the short form before venturing into writing a novel. However, the short story has frequently eluded me. While novels and feature films feel intuitive, with their large and climactic narrative arcs, their dynamic and wide-open characters, short stories have felt less straight-forward. Where should one start a story? Where should one end it?

I recently read an Oulipo piece, “How to Tell a Story,” by Jacques Bens. In it, a writer character named Matthew fails to teach a class of college students the art of story telling. Afterward, he wanders around Paris contemplating what he should’ve said and as he does so, he concocts an “example” story, featuring a young and beautiful barrel organist. At the end of his wandering, the organist, now flesh and blood, visits him in his office, telling him, the author, that the hero of his story now wants to marry her, which seems a bit fast. Then she adds, “I must be missing an element somewhere.” Matthew responds, “Yes, something is missing, that much is clear. But where? And what?”

I often feel just as Matthew does after finishing writing my own stories, and even more often after reading those of the greats. While some of my favorites wrote primarily short stories—Amy Hempel, Flannery O’Connor, and Donald Barthelme among them—I invariably turn to a guide of some sort, be it critics or the authors themselves. Whereas with novels I almost never do. I read it. I comprehend it. I move on. Even when I do turn to a guide for the purposes of teaching a novel, the guide does not suddenly reveal the meaning I missed. Usually, it merely helps me form the right question or locate the proper page number. What is left out of the story is almost always included in the novel. Why is this? I do not know.

Some things I’ve found helpful over the years are the writing exercises in 3AM Epiphany, George Saunders’ wonderful analysis of Russian stories, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, and a recent series of instructional videos from Reedsy, entitled “Short Fiction Deep Dive.” I hope these help you in your own journey and that they save you some of the time I spent puzzling and shaking my head.

Steven J. Kolbe Humorous, Literary fiction

Review: Standard Deviation

Graham Cavanaugh is on the twelfth year of his second marriage, Audra is his beyond-outgoing wife who works as a graphic designer part-time and may or may not be having an affair, Matthew is their middle-school-aged son with Asperger’s and an obsession with origami, and Elspeth is Graham’s ex-wife, a successful attorney who Audra is convinced they should become friends with. The characters of this novel are richly imagined, unique yet believable. The story itself is just as new and real as the people. Just when you think you know what’s happening or what’s coming, the story takes a hard left.

I have read a lot of funny books, but Katherine Heiny hangs with the best of them. Like very few authors–Dave Barry, Steve Martin, Nora Ephron–she is able to deliver real laughs almost every page. I was impressed and also wildly discouraged as a writer. Like all great books, this made me want to work a whole lot harder at my craft.

I just finished reading Standard Deviations and wrote this review immediately, because you have to read it!