cosmopolite

“My father was killed in Russia. The war turned me into a cosmopolite and opponent of all nationalisms and all politics while just a schoolboy.”

“He was a cosmopolite from Toronto, worldly, the kinda guy who’d be comfortable around the Queen of England herself. Me, I was a hick, born to the barren, rocky soil of the Ottawa Valley, where the richest man in town was the barber.”

Think Jay Gatsby meets Patrick Bateman meets Dickie Greenleaf: Yeun plays this smooth-talking cosmopolite with a pathological charm that never quite reveals itself in full, which is precisely what makes the characterization so uniquely chilling and seductive.

The cosmopolite respects and appreciates difference, while acknowledging that “no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting that each human being has responsibilities to every other.”

An unspoken but implied counterpoint to all the identities considered in The Lies That Bind is “cosmopolite,” which is how many Triestines viewed themselves in Svevo’s day.