Memories of making art in Stalinist Russia (Books - Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay)

When the Ragazzo and I were up in Kent,Connecticut to get married, we came across a little bookstore (fancy that). The woman behind the counter recommended Daphne Kalotay's new novel Russian Winter. I'm a sucker for personal recommendations in indy bookstores if they seem honest and, I must admit, I probably would not have read this heartfelt debut novel otherwise.

Russian Winter is set alternately in post-World War II Russia and contemporary Boston and is structured around the auction of the jewelry of a now-retired prima ballerina of Russia's Bolshoi ballet, Nina Revskaya. A description of the featured jewels and their price, as might appear in an auction catalog, head each chapter. Of particular interest is a set of amber jewels. Although Nina offers what she believes is a complete set, an anonymous donor donates a last piece, not so much because he wishes to be generous but because he knows that the origin of these jewels holds the secret of his parentage, of which he is ignorant. Unfortunately, this story is so painful Nina, that she refuses to meet him. The plot of Russian Winter is the uncovering of this secret, and in doing so offers an historical novel of Stalin's Russia, a touching story about family origins and love, and a mystery whose solution I thought I had, but the complete details were a surprise to me.

This is a lot to take on in a debut novel and occasionally the seams show. The details around dance rehearsals and performance sometime read like a well researched list of technical terms, I couldn't smell that mixture of rosin, old sprung wood floors, and sweat. I felt that Kalotay lived inside the details of what it was like to be an artist in Stalinist USSR much more completely. The lack of privacy in shared living quarters, the summer dacha and banya, what people ate, what they wore, what it was like to tour. One of the novel's most vivid sections is when three dancers on tour in East Berlin looking for makeup and tights in accidentally cross to the West.

They emerge from the subway to a bustling street, oddly bright though the sky is as gray and cold as before. Shop windows glow with neon signs, and above them, big and clean, are billboards such as Nina has never seen, colorful and spotlit even though it is daytime. People everywhere; even their coats and hats look brighter, somehow. "That's why everyone had to get off." Nina says it even though it is clear from Polina's and Vera's faces that they too understand.

"We're not supposed to be here," Polina says.

"We didn't know," Vera whispers, eyes wide as she takes in the scene before them, the people walking at an easy clip, unworried, and the buildings that, while still somewhat derelict, are cleaner and free of rubble, with lights illuminating their windows...

In front of them is a vegetable kiosk. And there, heaped at the end, like something out of a fairy tale, is a stack of bright yellow bananas.

Polina and Vera too stare, as Nina allows herself to fully take in the scene around her...

I love the sense Kalotay went after of Dorothy emerging into colorful Oz following the drab sepia of Kansas, but the bananas are her "money shot." Unfortunately, Kalotay sometimes relies on explaining a little more than she needs to. I wish she had had a few more bananas.

Another strength of this novel is its marvelously detailed secondary characters. Nina's mother-in-law, a member of the defunct aristocracy, embittered by her decline in status, with whom Nina must live once she is married. Fellow dancer, Polina, whose conflict about being a good friend or a good citizen by informing on her colleagues so torments her that she breaks on in a horrible skin rash. These characters really inhabited flesh.

The sub-plot of Gershstein (Gersh), a soviet composer, who is hounded and eventually imprisoned because of Stalin's paranoid anti-Semitism, and his wife, Zoya whose desperate optimism keeps her trying to be the model party member throughout his imprisonment, was particularly engrossing. It integrates factual historical research, with a sense of living in a summer dacha, and all the while Gersh and Viktor, Nina's husband and a successful poet, debate for whom the artists works in Stalinist Russia.

"You sound like Zoya!" Gersh says, as Viktor surely expects him to. He can mention her today, because Vera has gone off one one of her long walks, gathering mushrooms. By the gate, her hand resting on the iron fence, Nina moves through her daily barre exercises. She hasn't skipped a day of training. Even a week of missed practice could mean bruised toes and aching limbs when her muscles are forced to work again.

"This utilitarian view of art makes my insides squirm," Gersh says. "You know that, of course."

"Why do you put up with her, anyway?" Nina calls.

"Who?"

"Zoya!"

"She makes me look good, don't you think?" Gersh says in his teasing voice. In a lisping imitation, he adds, "Upright citizen. Party spirit and all that. Perfectly commendable, actually."

Nina doesn't laugh; even in his mocking, Gersh seems uncomfortable. Perhaps Zoya really does feel to him like some kind of badge of approval. There has been more anti-Semetic commentary: editorials in the press, even another swipe at Gersh himself by one particularly belligerent critic whom Viktor has nicknamed "the Rottweiler." More than once Nina has glimpsed the slogan "Down with the Cosmopolites!" Maybe Gersh really does see Zoya as a protector of sorts.

"I'm not joking," Viktor says. "I mean what I said. About reaching the people. There's a reason front-row seats cost only three rubles at your theater, Nina. Life is hard, people are tired. You bring them beauty. You make them proud. You remind us of all we're capable of - that we ourselves are a work in progress, creating a great new society. Why do you think our Iosef Vissarionovich himself prefers the biggest, most colorful productions? He knows it's the monumental stuff - the most colorful scenery, the brightest costumes - that has the strongest impact."

"Exactly," Gersh says, "this is exactly the problem! There's no room for complexity, for sensitivity, for anything the slightest bit challenging. Instead we're supposed to pander to the audience. When, really, how are they every going to learn to appreciate anything truly profound? Everything always has to be exaggerated. And you know why: because people need to be cued. They need to be told what they're supposed to think.

What Kalotay does beautifully here in terms of setting is capture that breadth of life that Chekhov's plays or Mikhailkov's films capture - everyone is going about their lives and simultaneously talking. However, although the subject of the debate is perfect, it does not seem a part of the character's larger lives. It reads to me like an explanation for the reader of a key argument of the time which Kalotay researched. A composer and a poet who live and work in the mileu of other artists would talk about their own or other's specific works, an artistic problem they are solving, what someone did or did not do in the rehearsal, such and such a painting, they would be unlikely to have a discussion about "pandering to the audience" and "reaching the people" in this general and illustrative way. This aspect of Russian Winter was not entirely satisfying for me.

Luckily Kalotay is passionate about her subject matter, her interest clearly comes from some personal place. I was fascinated by the setting, and after any quibbles I might have about living in the details, the plotting was excellent and kept me reading with genuine interest. Kalotay also writes two poems in the voice of Viktor that I found lovely and convincing. Russian Winter's multiple layers of memory create a wholeness that enveloped me.

All for love of a 'good' novel (Books - A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé)

I used to be good about writing down where I heard about a book so that when I wrote about it here, I could give credit where credit was due. Laurence Cossé's A Novel Bookstore never made it to the list, ah well, thank you whomever it was - I enjoyed it!

A Novel Bookstore - the title alone would win over this booklover's heart. Set in France and concerns the passionate founding of a bookstore in Paris which only sells 'Good Novels.' These are selected by a panel of eight writers, all given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. It is underwritten by Francesca, a wealthy lover of good writing, and Ivan, a wandering unambitious soul, who has worked most of his adult life in bookshops. They open to considerable fanfare and develop a strong following, and then, mysteriously, attacks begin in the newspapers. 'Elitism,' they cry. 'Don't read what's good for you, read for pleasure!' (As if those two must be mutually exclusive.) When that doesn't ruin them, the eight committee members begin to be physically attacked - nearly murdered. So Francesca engages her nephew, Heffner, in the police force, to investigate the crimes discreetly.

Cossé's creation is, therefore, partly a mystery, but she weaves in a delicate love story, and much of the novel is devoted to an appreciation of 'good' French writing. But while A Novel Bookstore shows the world a facade of lite literary entertainment, and it is entertaining, I read the book as a comment on anti-elitism. Certain political factions use this rhetoric to create a frenzy in a sector of the public that takes refuge in being one of the pack. And the business world loves such homogeneity, because they can better predict the behavior of buyers, however, it is sheer hypocrisy, this anti-elitism, when it comes out of the mouth of, say, Yale graduates or people spending six figures on PR campaigns for themselves as, say, political candidates. These same people who claim to be so very salt-of-the-earth want the very 'best' person to run the armed forces. They want the very 'best' surgeon to operate on their children when they're in need of care. And they are completely elitist when it comes to the players they prize in sports that they enjoy. Dont' tell me all these famous anti-elitists refuse to watch the Olympics.

In any event, anti-elitism versus equal representation for all (good, common-place, and mediocre) is the subject of A Novel Bookstore. Cossé delivers her argument with delight for good reading and writerly skill at setting the stage and driving the reader's interest.

One could hardly say that Paul Néon's disappearance caused a stir in the canton of Biot, where he had apparently settled for good, nor in Les Crets, the scrawny village where he inhabited the very last house.

Paul collapsed on a thick bed of rotting leaves below the forestry road, along which he must have been staggering for some time already (ten days later, young Jules Reveriaz would find his scarf at the edge of the path, fifty feet from the place where he had fallen). Two or three dead branches cracked beneath his weight. When silence returned, there was a a brief moment of vibration...

Cossé creates that same atmosphere Hitchcock does, one that has you listening into the silence, sure something will pop out at any second. Cossé made one unfortunate choice in having much of the narrative presented as the events leading up to the crimes are verbally related to Heffner. This conceit is not followed through in the style of the writing, that is to say, it feels like writing not speech, so whenever she returns our attention to the fact that this is a dialogue with Heffner (mostly monologue, in fact) I found it jarring. Aside from this conceit, the book was engaging and it made me curious enough about many of the beloved authors of Francesca, Ivan, and their committee that I have ordered a few. Cossé also creates a sense of verisimilitude. Her plot is so plausible that I was sure that the the writers on the committee and the shop on the rue d'Odéon actually existed. Given that I'll be in Paris this summer, maybe I'll check it out, just to be sure.

Contrasting cultures - French and American (Books - The Chateau by William Maxwell)

It's been a couple of weeks since I have been able to either write here or make my usual rounds of friends in the blogosphere. I've been writing my last class paper. I'll now be writing papers for publication or (eventually) writing my dissertation, but the classwork is done! Yet, somehow in 15 minutes on the subway or 20 minutes before going to sleep, I managed to finish two books that had nothing to do with that paper, so I am looking forward to catching up with you here this weekend.

The Ragazzo and I will be going to France (and England) this summer. So I retrieved William Maxwell's The Chateau from my teetering TBR pile, not an easy task as it had worked its way down about a foot, and I finally read it. I remember our late book blogging friend Dewey telling me that she wasn't sure I would like The Chateau, but I cannot remember why. But I enjoyed both its pace, and Maxwell's focus on the inner lives of two Americans, Harold and Barbara Rhodes, as they travel in France in 1948, just after the war. Just a peek at the first description of Harold will give you an idea of the level of detail
Maxwell is interested in when it comes to character.

He was thin, flat-chested, narrow-faced, pale from lack of sleep, and tense in his movements. A whole generation of loud, confident Middle-Western voices saying: Harold, sit up straight...Harold hold your shoulders back...Harold, you need a haircut, you look like a violinist had had no effect whatever. Confidence had slipped through his fingers. Her had failed to be like other people.

Along with Harold's physical appearance we get his lineage and a detail of his inner life that is probably one of his most guarded secrets. Maxwell unfurls Harold in three confident sentences, the words seemingly plunked down on the page like change on the counter.

And when Maxwell introduces us to M. Carrere, a wealthy, elderly visitor convalescing at the chateau, not only is the description's content appropriately different to this character's details, Maxwell's more distinguished diction matches what he is describing.

He was not like anybody they had every seen before. Though he seemed a kind man, there was an authority in his manner that kind men do not usually have. His face was long and equine. His eyes were set deep in his head. His hands were extraordinary. You could imagine him playing the cello or praying in the desert. When he smiled he looked like an expert old circus clown. He did not appear to want the attention of everybody when he spoke, and yet he invariably had it, Harold noticed. If he was aware of the dreary fact that there are few people who are not ready to take advantage of natural kindness in the eminent and the well-to-do, it did not bother him. The overlapping folds of his eyelids made his expression permanently humorous, and his judicious statements issued from a wide sensual, shocking red mouth.

Is there anything else you want to know?

While Maxwell's book is, on one level, the soap opera of guest and host relationships, and the chronicle of visits to pastry shops and castles, the whole while the story is really one of contrasting cultures - French and American. Interesting in light of the current drama around Strauss-Kahn, hmm? In this book, French and American culture meets in the context of immediate post-war deprivation following the violent liberation of France from the Germans by the Americans. As Harold and Barbara come to know their hosts and fellow guests, they face a mixture of embarrassed gratefulness, envy, and resentment and, despite the long months they spend and even some basic French, this creates of each person a mystery. Harold and Barbara cannot penetrate the inner lives and the motivations of their actions remains inscrutable. This is the real subject of The Chateau. It's neither a travel book, nor a plot driven novel per se, though both those elements exist.

After they had scrambled down the steep sandbank to the water's edge, they saw some hikers and cyclists waiting a hundred yards upstream, at the exact spot where Mme Vienot had said the ferry would come. She and Harold began to help Mme Straus-Muguet up the bank again. The two girls took off their shoes and waded into the water. The sound of their voices and their laughter made him turn and look back. Alix tucked the hem of her skirt under her belt. Then the two girls waded in deeper and deeper, with their dresses pulled up and their white thighs showing.

There are certain scenes that (far more than artifacts dug up out of the ground or prehistoric cave paintings, which have a confusing freshness and newness) serve to remind us of how old the human race is, and of the beautiful, touching sameness of most human occasions. Anything that is not anonymous is all a dream. And who we are, and whether our parents embraced life or were disappointed by it, and what will become of our children couldn't be less important. Nobody asks the name of the athlete tying his sandal on the curved side of the Greek vase or whether the lonely traveler on the Chinese scroll arrived at the inn before dark.

Maxwell's book is like a dance between the perspective of mystery, in which Harold and Barbara cannot seem to know the people they have met, no matter how hard they try, and the broader perspective Harold glimpses in the moment just excerpted, in which what they share as human beings looms far larger.

The last forty pages of The Chateau is an epilogue in which Maxwell breaks the stately, more old fashioned chronicle of events format and explains all the mysteries in a question/answer dialogue format that feels like a magazine article. I found the need for this key inexplicable. It almost ruined the book for me. I felt pandered to by its ironic tone. I had preferred the encounters of the story complete with their mysteries but, when I look back on the novel with two week's hindsight, that story is all I remember.

Writing to defeat the darkness (Books - The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon)

I really have no business being here, as I'm in the middle of writing a final paper on depression, hence the parade of cheerful books, however, I did find The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression written by Andrew Solomon in 2001 remarkably well-written. Like Styron's Darkness Visible it is a writer's memoir of the experience of depression, but where Styron's is a fleeting paean to the indescribable blackness, his white flag to the black dog, Solomon unleashes a flood of fellow sufferer's personal narratives, merciless descriptions of his defenseless self, a history of melancholia from the Greeks to Freud to the latest genetics research, as though the very acts of knowing and writing will vanquish his demon. They make for a bone-shaking, yet gripping account of suffering that, though it is 300 pages long, one can fly through.

Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one's self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself. Love, though it is no prophylactic against depression, is what cushions the mind and protects it from itself. Medications and psychotherapy can renew that protection, making it easier to love and be loved, and that is why they work... In depression, the meaninglessness of every enterprise and every emotion, the meaninglessness of life itself, becomes self-evident. The only feeling left in this loveless state is insignificance.

It would be worth going on at length if I convince you to read Solomon's book, but I have to get back to convincing a professor that I've done some substantive reading on psychopathology. I'll close with a brief plug for Solomon's earlier book: The Irony Tower, which is also well worth a read. It follows a group of contemporary Moscow artists as they try to figure out what their art means and why they make it, as their country transitions from Soviet empire to whatever Russia is now - plutocracy? Capitalist anarchy? I found it fascinating.

It's bite is worse than its bark (Books - Darkness Visible by William Styron)

William Styron is best known as the author of the novels, The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice, books about moral responsibility. He suffered from episodes of major depression, once facing hospitalization for it. Darkness Visible is his memoir of that experience. It is as cuttingly brief and eloquent a literary description of the deep suffering of depression as you are likely to find. I found it interesting how frequently Styron made reference to the experience of depression as indescribable, while producing a volume on it - quoting many other writers on the themes of depression, suffering, and suicide - William James, Albert Camus, and Dante. The inadequacy is exemplified by his dissatisfaction of the fitness of the word itself - depression - a the descriptor our age is stuck with.

"Melancholia" would still appear to be a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder, but it was usurped by a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness. It may be that the scientist generally held responsible for its currency in modern times, a Johns Hopkins Medical School faculty member justly venerated - the Swiss-born psychiatrist Adolf Meyer - had a tin ear for the finer rhythms of English and therefore was unaware of the semantic damage he had inflicted by offering "depression" as a descriptive noun for such a dreadful and raging disease. Nonetheless, for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.

As one who has suffered from the malady in extremis yet returned to tell the tale, I would lobby for a truly arresting designation. "Brainstorm," for instance, has unfortunately been preempted to describe, somewhat jocularly, intellectual inspiration. But something along these lines is needed. Told that someone's mood disorder has evolved into a storm - a veritable howling tempest in the brain, which is indeed what a clinical depression resembles like nothing else - even the uninformed layman might display sympathy rather than the standard reaction that "depression" evokes, something akin to "So what?" or "You'll pull out of it" of "We all have bad days." The phrase "nervous breakdown" seems to be on its way out, certainly deservedly so, owing to its insinuation of a vague spinelessness, but we still seem destined to be saddled with "depression" until a better, sturdier name is created.

Styron's literary evocation of being in the hole is relentless, and even while his discussion on medication and presumed mechanisms is dated, the way he captures being inside of it has not lost its bite. I'm beginning work on a paper on geriatric depression for school and although journal articles on psychological and neurobiological mechanisms is going to be its mainstay, literature seemed the place to start. I'm looking forward to reading Styron's Lie Down in Darkness this summer, once the term has ended, so taken was I with his voice. I found a copy on a curbside bookseller's table a few years back.

Four things...

Four things, courtesy of Thomas, his changes in red.

Four Jobs I Have Had in My Life

1. Seller of typewriter ribbons and office supplies on the phone - yuck
2. Charge box office at Lincoln Center
3. Lab assistant to a parasitologist (feed and anesthetize the snails...no really)
   
4. Teaching acting to opera singers
   

Four Books Movies I Would Read Have Seen Over and Over Again:

1. A Room with a View
2. Diner
3. Fanny and Alexander
4. Burnt by the Sun

Four Places (other than NY) I Have Lived:

1. Waltham, Massachusetts
2. Chicago, Illinois
3. Milwaukee, Wisconsin
4. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
   

Four Books from the Modern Library Top 100 List I Would Recommend:

1. Angel of Repose by Wallace Stegner
2. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
3. Howard's End by E. M. Forster
4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
   

Four Places I Have Been that are great to visit:

1. Skagen, Denmark
2. Amsterdam, Holland
   
3. St. Paul de Vence, France (but anywhere in Provence, really)
   
4. Berlin, Germany
   

Four of My Favorite Foods:

1. Olives
2. Cheese
   
3. Sushi
   
4. very dark and bitter chocolate
   

Four of My Favorite Drinks:

1. Red wine from Bordeaux
2. Really great black coffee
3. Green tea
   
4. Rivella (rot)
   

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

1. In a garden in the Cotswolds after a hike and tea
2. In a certain hotel room in Granada, Spain looking up from my book at the Alhambra any time I feel like it.
3. In Engelberg, Switzerland, gazing at the mountains
4. in a theatre
   

Four Things That Are Very Special in My Life:

1. The Ragazzo
2. family
3. friends
   
4. that I'm getting a chance to go back to school after a whole career and do something different

The laws of science and the mysteries of the human soul collide (Books - The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald)

Penelope Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels might be called an intellectual romp, a flirtation of ideas. It's one part English novel of manners, one part novel of the intellectual zeitgeist of Cambridge 1912, and one part American screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks. Quite the cocktail. I can imagine that Connie Willis might have taken a page from this book's style.

How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill Road past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the open ground to the left the willow-trees had been blown, driven and cracked until their branches gave way and lay about the drenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts of twigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weeping leaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their experience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on the their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.

And this circus-of-a-paragraph brilliantly sets the scene, not merely for the novel's comic style and harried tempo, but also for the world of 1912. The gate of angels is a narrow gate, hardly ever opened, at St. Angelicus, a college at Cambridge. Fred Fairly, son of an English village rector and a Junior Fellow at St. Angelicus, begins to study physics, learn of the atom, and turn family tradition upside down. That is, until his bicycle crashes into Daisy Saunders's and Fred's infatuation begins. St. Angelicus has a strict policy of celibacy, so one could say that this episode opens its own little gate, letting in chaos.

The brief novel's four parts focus separately on the stories of Fred, Daisy, and Dr. Matthews, a medievalist and writer of ghost stories. Fitzgerald weaves them all together to explore the worlds of the humanities and the sciences as they collide in their own bicycle crash of sorts. Her cri de coeur in this novel is that scientific thought and ordinary everyday thought are not different, we just don't know enough to see how they are the same. It's an odd but a smart and, at the same time, very funny little book.

Satire of American ex-pats in Florence (Books - World so Wide by Sinclair Lewis)

Sinclair Lewis is an American writer best known for Main Street, Babbitt, Dodsworth, Elmer Gantry, and Arrowsmith, but he authored 22 novels in all between 1914 and 1951. World So Wide was his last. I picked it up the original, jacketed Random House edition pictured to the left in an antique store in Indiana last summer.

By his last book, Lewis has cultivated an elegant, confident narrative voice. Much like the film scripts of the same era, it had an almost singing tone. And his polished technique knew how to establish and plot and character in a stroke, without the song ever stopping. This is the novel's opening:

The traffic policemen and the two detectives from the homicide squad, examined the tracks of the car and were convinced that a soft shoulder of the road had given way.

They had been returning from Bison Park, after midnight but quite sober. Hayden Chart was driving the convertible and hating his wife, Caprice, and hating himself for hating her. He was not given to grudges and, despite her glitter of pale-green dinner dress and her glitter of derisive gossip, Caprice was a simpleton who no more deserved hatred than did a noisy child. But she did chatter so. It wore Hayden down like a telephone bell ringing incessantly in an empty house.

Quite an opener; but the contemporary reader must tolerate Lewis's overt patriarchal sexism to appreciate his prose and storytelling. I found it grating, but not without self-awareness, and Lewis's satirizing spares no one. Lewis sets up the entire plot in one compact paragraph at the end of the first chapter so that the reader knows where they are going.

He came clearly to in a hospital, with his head bandaged and Dr. Crittenham, their mild indecisive family physician, by the bed. He felt miraculously safe, and not for two days did he know that Caprice had been buried the day before, and that he was desolatingly free to wander in a world too bleakly too intimidatingly wide.

And wander he does, to Europe, mostly to Florence, in a plan to recover his sense of having a future. Today we might call it achieving closure. Lewis creates a musical refrain, with the repetition of melodious passages featuring the phrase "world so wide" to close many chapter sections. It reads like nothing so much as a monologue in a Broadway play of the 1930s or 40s:

He was not to think back fifteen years to the time when he was twenty, credulous and enthusiastic, when he was strong for walking, for singing, for making love. He was to look fifteen years ahead to the time when he would be fifty - and a fine, sound, competent age that was, too, when he ought to be able to eat and laugh and make love as well as ever. Compared with fifty, he still was young, he had recovered youth. Ah, the blazing wonders he was going to experience in these fifteen years ahead, with perhaps another twenty-five years on top of that! He was going to see all of the world so wise.

Corny, I know, but bold. Who would dare write "Ah, the blazing wonders he was going to experience..." today? Or:

The whole house was a dead thing now that it was deserted by Caprice's yelling and flouncing and running up and downstairs and telephoning violently and for hours. A dream and a languid, draining dream then was his hasty giving-away of Caprice's clothes, and her poor treasures: the silver-gilt vanity case, the onyx desk-set, her stout little ski boots, the flimsy bathing suits that she had loved. It was a dream of a life in which he had been busy and important and well-bedded and well-fed and had glowingly possessed everything except friends and contentment and any reason for living: a dream, a fable, a caricature of grandeur.

And so, off to Florence goes Hayden Chart, where he meets a cast of thoroughly-satirized ex-pats, including Lorenzo Lundsgard, who hopes to package old world culture for Americans with no time to read, and a cold, dusty historian of Italian princes - Dr. Lydia Lomond - who has smooth hands even while she practices unforgiving scholarship. Ah, but that is the rest of story, which I wouldn't want to spoil if what I have told you so far is at all enticing. Lewis is a wonderful painter of characters, who wrote at a time when, if a good American novel was to be entertaining, then it was expected to be part-Hollywood film or part-Broadway play. I found World so Wide of-its-time, to be sure, but delightfully entertaining.

Join in the celebration... (International Anita Brookner Day - 16 July 2011)

On July 16th Anita Brookner, author of 24 novels, turns 83. Thomas and Simon have decided to celebrate with an event named just for her: International Anita Brookner Day. If you have always wanted to read one of her books but never have, or if you have been hankering to re-read some old favorites, now is your chance. Thomas makes it simple - here are his rules. I've only read The Debut, which I thought excellent, but with IABD on the horizon and having just won a copy of A Closed Eye from Thomas, I will give my attention to a second of her works. If you care to join in the fun, stop by Thomas's place and declare yourself.

Boys bonded by tragic loss (Books - The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah)

Nathacha Appanah's The Last Brother is a novel of a tender memory that Raj, an elderly man from Mauritius, has of a Jewish refugee his own age, held in the prison where his father worked in 1944. In a childhood of poverty and brutal deprivation, one of the few beautiful things that happens to him is meeting David, one of a group of exiles from the Holocaust, detained because Palestine refused to take them in and turned their boat around. Although the two can share a few words of schoolroom French as their only means of verbal communication, what bonds them is devastating loss sustained while still boys.

It may have been at this moment that I realized I was dreaming. I do not know where it comes from, this sudden awareness, I wonder why the real world sometimes invades a dream. On this occasion I found the vague sensation most unwelcome and struggled to convince myself that David really was there, simply and patiently waiting for me to wake up. All right, I told myself, I'm going to tease him, say something to him like you're showing off, you're striking a pose, but I could not utter a sound. I made a superhuman effort, opened my jaws wide, trying and trying, but in vain, my throat dried up. It is incredible how real this felt, great gulps of air streaming in through my open mouth and parching everything inside. At that moment I sensed that I was on the brink of waking but I thought if I lay still the dream would last. So I stayed in bed, I closed my mouth, I went on looking toward the door but I could not quell the sadness that had arisen in my heart.

At the very moment when this grief swept over me, David came closer. With one supple movement he slipped his shoulder away from the door frame, his hands still in his pockets, and took three steps. I counted. Three steps. David was tall, strong, adult, handsome, so handsome. Then I really knew I was dreaming and could do nothing about it. The last time I had seen him he was ten years old.

I find Appanah's writing as translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan, captures that fairytaleish dream-state beautifully. It's full of the visceral details that makes what one is reading into what seems to be happening to us. The writing also has a certain musical quality reminiscent of what it is like to be read to as a child.

Grasping the big knot with both hands over my shoulder, I would climb back up the long road to my home. The sheet would slither about and I would have to give it a heave with my hips to hitch the bundle up again and get a new grip on the knot. There was no stopping, I would have had to put the sheet down on the ground and I would have gotten dirty. I was really afraid of dropping that sheet and the dresses, skirts, corsets, slips, and pants being strewn over the ground, so that, just like my father, my mother, too, would begin to regret that it was me, Raj, who had survived. Anil would have had no problem carrying that bundle, he was so strong, and Vinod would have devised a better method of balancing the weight on his back and would have carried it with a smile, as he used to when he was burdened with two quaking buckets filled to the brim with water.

Though not in the least romantic, this is nothing so much as a love story, weighted for its entirety with enormous sadness. At the same time, the alluring narrative voice swiftly propels the reader through its events. I read the majority of the book in one sitting, late into the evening, and wanted to start nothing else once I had finished. I lovely book - I wish I could remember who recommended it.

Being stereotyped doesn't just feel bad, it's bad for you (Books - Whistling Vivaldi by Claude M. Steele)

Claude Steele's Whistling Vivaldi is an excellent new work of social science for the lay-reader about how stereotypes impact the performance and even the long-term health of stereotyped group via a phenomenon called stereotype threat. There is an ever-growing mountain of experimental evidence for the existence of such a phenomenon, which Steele contends has less to do with a stereotyped person internalizing their society's racism as part of their personality, although that is one influence, and more to do with the way these social realities are ubiquitous, resulting in the stereotyped party receiving continual cues about the poor expectations of his performance from his environment. Steele presents research that debunks the myth that the simple solution to this problem is always to work harder. In fact, having a lot at stake and working at the most challenging level are two important contributors to the threat effect.

Steel tracks the evidence collected to-date about the mechanism of stereotype threat at three levels - society, identity, and brain (though he offers the least support for the last, sadly, as there are some very good studies out there). Although Steele's history explores newsworthy domains such as as stereotypes about women being poorer at math than men, and about those with dark skin being less academically strong than those with light, but he makes the point repeatedly that identity threat can and does effect most everyone, offering good examples. He chooses not only the obvious settings of the classroom and the running track to make his point, but some unlikely ones as well - such as the Supreme Court. Steele's writing is attractively free of self-serving hyperbole, his anecdotes illustrate his points clearly, he doesn't oversell them, and the book is both compact and fast-moving.

Music and idealism as the wall comes tumbling down (Books - The Student Conductor by Robert Ford)

Tom called Robert Ford's The Student Conductor one is his 10 best neglected literary classics. That and the classical music theme were good enough reason for me to check it out.

Set in Karlsruhe Germany around the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford writes with vivid clarity.

Barrow woke to the hard yank of an oncoming train and caught the whisper of the last orange car as it passed. Outside, the German sun flung itself in all directions, glanced from the rails, perfected clouds. It was the kind of day they polish steel for.

Cooper Barrow, his protagonist, is a young American conductor who faces disillusionment early in his career, forcing him off the podium one day in the middle of his debut concert. Eight years later, he comes to Germany to study under the baton of Karlheinz Ziegler, a charismatic and dictatorial master teacher to try to restart his career. Ford skillfully weaves together three forces - artistic idealism, political passion, and good old human lust to create a intense drama. I found him most skillfull at writing scenes of strong tension. At his initial audition Ziegler asks Barrow, disheveled from his train ride, to "conduct" movements from standard repertoire symphonies and concerti without an actual orchestra. That is, to manufacture the orchestra and the sound he would have them make, with the expressions of his body. As he does so, he is quizzed on his orchestra's size, arrangement, and his choices for tempi:

"First symphony, fourth movement."

Beethoven's First - it had to be. The coincidence struck him. His last time before an orchestra, it had also been Beethoven's First.

His wrists shook. The hall was a cavernous void, nothing but a place to breathe. He raised his arms, left palm up, stick delivered straight forward. Conjure orchestra -

"You're shaking!"

Thanks, he thought. He'd crossed an ocean for this.

His arms opened to embrace the solid trunk of the fourth movement's opening fortissimo, and with a simple flick of the wrist he indicated an upbeat, released the opening sonority. The thick chord sprang up in his head. Full orchestra. Tutti. He held it, widened the embrace just so much, swiftly cut it off.

"Halt, halt, halt! Wie gross ist das Orchester?"

He would not have thought to ask -

"How large is the orchestra?" the teacher demanded, in English this time.

"I understand," Barrow shouted back in German, noting the shrillness in his voice. "Modern orchestra. Eighteen firsts, sixteen seconds, viola twelve, cello - "

"Aufstellung."

The English, the English -

"Aufstellung?!"

Arrangement.

"Traditional. Firsts here, seconds here, celli..." Barrow indicated the placement of violins to his left, celli to his right -

"Continue," yelled the teacher in German - it would always be German, German from here on in.

The opening six bars consumed thirty minutes of harassment. The correct length of the eight note, the gradations of soft, softer, softest, their precise indication with his hands. A good conductor would never rehearse a full orchestra this way, this stopping and starting; they would mutiny. He would call out suggestions, cajole in passing, return only later to pick up what was missing.

Barrow began the new tempo, the Allegro molte e vivace -

"Too loud, too loud!"

There's no fucking orchestra!

He fought the impulse to turn, face his accuser. He didn't have to. The teacher had advanced to the lip of the stage, and it was Barrow's first look a Maestro Karlheinz Ziegler...

What Ford is best at is creating passages full of tension, made of the characters' emotions, their charged mileu and, often, music. It definitely helps to have some knowledge of classical repertoire in reading this novel. Where he falls short is in his plotting, which so engineers his coincidences of past and present that one can feel them coming. The climax and denouement of the book left me a bit unsatisfied, because the mysteries hinted at in the major characters are too set-up. This flaw aside I really recognized the people and places (I worked in the field for years) and the mind-games of a guru-like maestro. I enjoyed the characters, and I read the book compulsively, in two sittings, the second keeping me up quite late. There is a fabulous scene between Ziegler and Cooper that takes place in a sauna toward the end of the book that contains stunningly tense writing. It is reason enough to read the book.

Following reading it, I was sorry not to be able to find anything else by Ford - is there anything you know of, Tom?

The narratives that make us (Books - Rodin's Debutante by Ward Just)

I am a fan of Ward Just's writing - reflective, masculine fiction that often spans the lives of its central figures, exploring how the larger motivating forces that comprise their characters intersect with the contexts of politics, art, and the private realm to make up their lives. Exiles in the Garden, Just's last book concerned a photo journalist who turns his professional eye to art photography - does one find more meaning in life living inside the fray or out of it, this book asked. The Translator is about adapting to change both in the historical and the personal contexts. I found Forgetfulness a particularly masterful novel about living post-loss - do we best remember by seeking violent justice or through love?

Just's latest, Rodin's Debutante, has a four-part structure and a subtlety similar to that of The Translator, but like Exiles in the Garden it looks at the life of a creative artist in the context of the personal as well as the political spheres. Lee Goodell's family leave their small Illinois town in the wake of its first violent crime, a rape, and move to the Chicago suburbs. Lee attends Ogden Hall, a private all-boys school, coming of age by leading their failing football team to victory. These events are charted in an old-world, third-person narrative voice. There are two strongly formative life events that propel Lee into his adulthood, one is a meeting with Ogden's Hall's reclusive founder who attempts to share some life lessons with Lee. Chiefly he imparts that one's successes are more valuable than one's mistakes. The second is a Rodin bust, putatively of Tommy's Ogden's wife, Marie, in the school's study hall, which influences his decision to become a sculptor.

The day before Christmas robin's-egg-blue boxes arrived by special messenger at the homes of the twenty-two members of the Ogden Hall football team. They were from Tiffany's, New York. Each box contained a three-ounce silver cup with the boy's name and jersey number and the year engraved on the inside rim. The mothers noticed the stamp on the bottom that indicated sterling silver and said in astonishment, Well! My goodness! There was no notes with the box or any indication of who sent it, befuddling the mothers who insisted that their sons write a thank-you note at once; but there was no one to send it to. Lee Goodell knew, but he believed that Tommy Ogden was owed his anonymity, if that was what he wanted. He certainly did not want the old man to be inconvenienced, forced to read twenty-two notes of appreciation, all composed by hand in schoolboy script. The benefactor thus remained unknown. Lee was delighted by the gesture and wherever he went thereafter he took the silver cup with him in his shaving kit, wrapped in its yellow chamois sleeve. When ever he had something to celebrate he filled the cup with whiskey or cognac and gave the old man a salute before he drank it off; the vessel was identical to Tommy Ogden's. At such time he remembered the final game, Hopkins's two touchdowns and his one, the missed point-after, the cheering all afternoon, long-haired Willa jumping, Mr. Svenson's tears, and Tommy Ogden's open Cadillac idling beyond the far goalpost. A beautiful day, a beautiful season, and a secret to wrap things up. Yet it was also true that the day was never anything more than itself. If there was a metaphor present Lee never discovered what it was.

We then experience the birth of Lee into his adulthood, this related in the first-person. A violent crime also occurs around this time, but to whom and in what way I won't reveal to you. I wasn't always convinced of Ward's rendering of Lee's dialogue as a young man, so self-possessed did it sound. I also found it striking that, while the text could conjure up physical pictures of what female characters looked like, I could never envision the males. Although Lee is a memorable central character, I have no idea what he physically looks like. But Just writes beautifully solid prose that is compact while covering swathes of time. He tells stories about the ideas that form us - our taste, our morals, our politics - and reveals them through plot and structure.

The events that form us are clearly this book's refrain. Or more precisely, it's not the events themselves, but the narratives we develop of them. There is a handsome and pleasing neatness to the structure of Just's novel. Two beautiful events, and two violent events, each of which find eternal life as narratives. These narratives are, on the one hand, the psychological scaffolding of Lee's character and, on the other, creative works - like those Lee (and Just) make. It is not so much the veracity of the events that are vital to their power, rather that they capture what is of essence. Actually, the truth of the narratives' surface details are not the matter at all. Lee goes on to value learning from his mistakes much more than his victories, and the bust is not of Marie. The violent acts are, in fact, failed completely by narrative. They conceal more than they reveal and yet, their force is irrefutable, strengthening in the case of Lee and crippling in the case of the young women who is raped.

There is another notable theme in Rodin's Debutante, namely how mens' successes in our society are so often built on a foundation of cruelty toward women. Rodin's bust was, initially to have been of Ogden's wife Marie. But in an impotent gesture of revenge, Ogden denies his wife the money, building a private school instead. A young woman of lower class is raped, the precise events of the crime are not covered in the newspaper - as the illusion of stability and safety its middle-class residents survive on is more important to the men in power than the well-being of the crime's victim. Just writes of a world governed by men who careen between what they see as irresolvable choices: intellectuality and violence, brawn and kindness, pragmatic wheeling-dealing and reclusiveness, and remembering victories or losses. Lee learns the value of confronting both sides of his nature and tries to make something both honest and lasting out of that knowledge. His medium, as it is free of words, sometimes lies less, but as marble has less explanatory power it reveals less too and Lee seems content with that.

The tragedy of substituting convention for deep and independent thought (Books - Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy)

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure is a tragedy, heavy with the inevitability of the great Greek plays. Jude Fawley is a poor man whose learns the trade of stone mason, but who is widely read, having passionately studied for years to fulfill his dream of studying at a university at Christminster (Hardy's fictionalized Oxford).

It was not till now, when he found himself actually on the spot of his enthusiasm, that Jude perceived how far away from the object of his enthusiasm he really was. Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shard a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall - but what a wall!

But the learned dons won't have a poor man. Jude also falls in love with his cousin, Sue Bridehead, herself a brilliant, self-taught scholar. Both break away from loveless marriages to live with each other, but don't marry as they would rather love each other freely than out of obligation. However, Victorian society is not ready for such iconoclasm, preferring the contractual arrangement they recognize, however abusive or loveless, to a self-made household built on love and mutual respect. Jude and Sue are persecuted mercilessly for their choice.

Hardy's writing is richly descriptive and the ideas that pulse through this novel are strikingly modern. He is a master at scenes that externalize his character's conflicts, creating for the reader a visceral experience which doubles as a potent symbol. This one, a symbol of Jude's youthful ambition and impulsivity:

In the dusk of that evening Jude walked away from his old aunt's as if to go home. But as soon as he reached the open down he struck out upon it till he came to a large round pond. The frost continued, though it was not particularly sharp, and the larger stars overhead came out slow and flickering. Jude put one foot on the edge of the ice, and then the other: it cracked under his weight; but this did not deter him. He ploughed his way inward to the centre, the ice making sharp noises as he went. When just about the middle he looked around him and gave a jump. The cracking repeated itself; but he did not go down. He jumped again, but the cracking had ceased. Jude went back to the edge, and stepped upon the ground.

It was curious, he thought. What was he reserved for?

Later in the book, as Jude and Sue's dreams are repeatedly crushed by society's rules and their opportunities ever diminished (though neither of them are out of their 20s), Hardy's concentration moves from their dreams to their suffering:

At some time near two o'clock, when he was beginning to sleep more soundly, he was aroused by a shrill squeak that had been familiar enough to him when he lived regularly at Marygreen. It was the cry of a rabbit caught in a gin. As was the little creature's habit, it did not soon repeat its cry; and probably would not do so more than once or twice; but would remain bearing its torture till the morrow, when the trapper would come and knock it on the head.

He who in his childhood had saved the lives of the earthworms now began to picture the agonies of the rabbit from its lacerated leg. It it were a "bad catch" by the hind leg, the animal would tug during the ensuing six hours till the iron teeth of the trap had stripped the leg-bone of its flesh, when, should a weak springed instrument enable it to escape it would die in the fields from the mortification of the limb. If it were a "good catch," namely, by the fore-leg, the bone would be broken, and the limb nearly torn in two in attempts at an impossible escape.

Almost half-an-hour passed, and the rabbit repeated its cry. Jude could rest no longer till he had put it out of its pain...

The vividness of this scene made me literally cringe as I read it. It reminds me strongly of another great scene of an animal's suffering used as a symbol in a novel - the beating of the horse in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. I usually think of these literary devices as dated yet, they make for bold experiential writing, not just intellectual exercise, and, as such, are tremendously effective.

Hardy's last and greatest novel (I think) tells us that people beg for conventions to resolve paradoxes inherent to human nature. They substitute them for deep and independent thinking because they find it so hard to live in the presence of more than one truth. Hardy is not just talking about the uneducated worker, but also of scholars and clergy - the learned men of his time. And when a few enlightened souls discover that they can have richer, happier lives by refusing to substitute convention for lives of courageous independence, those who crave the comforts of convention make sure that they're miserable for trying to do so. I was particularly struck by the modernity of this message re-reading the novel on the eve of my own marriage to the Ragazzo, whom many of you have read about here. It will be on our 10th anniversary.

Loving, adults who choose to create a family and share a celebration of their relationships are, of course, free to do so. And those who happen to be gay can also obtain a civil marriage license in five of the United States and D.C., and this is certainly progress of a sort. However, our federal government doles out more than 1,100 rights and privileges, some very substantial, based on the possession of that state-issued license if you are straight, but not if you are gay. This is the same document. We pay the same fee, and have the same ceremony and the same responsibilities, yet our federal government can treat us differently. This is legal inequity with personal, legal and financial consequences, not to mention emotional ones - here's one example. This is American law? I'm not talking about a religious rite. Those are determined by religious institutions, which are separate from the state under our constitution, and can opt to marry or not marry whom they choose.

The number of times we as a country have used the law to take away from one set of human beings what another has have been thankfully few, as they have always been mistaken. Our constitution declared black men and women to be 3/5 of a white person in order to justify the outrage of slavery. That was thankfully repealed, though the legacy of the institutionalization of such treatment continues. Women were denied the right to vote and run for public office in most states until under 100 years ago, and the legacy of their second class citizenship also persists. Our track record in abusing law to take away the privileges of a class of human beings is an ugly one. Repeating it would be foolish and yet many individuals not only possess such beliefs, but they run for public office on platforms which include legalization of them.

Some people use the argument of "tradition" against gay adults being allowed a civil marriage license. Which tradition are you talking about? The one where the contract gives the man ownership of the woman and her property? The one existing in many states until only forty years ago forbidding the marriage of two adults if they are of different races? Perhaps the one in multiple U.S. states that declares if two people live together for a significant period of time, declare and intend themselves to be married, referring to each other as such, that they are considered married in common-law (the exact requirements are different state to state). This status provides the legal benefits of a civil marriage and its dissolution actually entails a legal divorce. Yet the state of Kansas (for example) will honor that tradition and yet refuse to grant me a civil marriage license.

I love the fact that some people choose to criticize gay people's lack of stability and yet refuse us the very bricks and mortar that our society uses to build it. Hardy's Jude the Obscure has reminded me that conventions do not substitute for individual actions. It is our actions and feelings toward each other that have and will continue to be the meat of our relationship. Despite a soon to be filled-in license, we will face judgment from limited individuals and unequal treatment by our own government. The results of such narrow-mindedness and abuse are frequently tragic, as was true for Jude and Sue, but they shouldn't be. No person's happiness or freedom relies on the limits of another person's. As a supposedly free society we still have a lot of work to do.

I hope if you are happy for us, you will inform yourselves and others of the facts around legal marriage and consider its equitable application under United States law, whatever your religious proclivities:

Lambda Legal
Marriage Equality USA
Marriage Equality New York
Human Rights Campaign

In fact, I will be presenting my home State of New York with my bills for having to travel to Connecticut, where I can obtain a license, an expense not incurred by my straight fellow citizens. In addition, I will include a full report of the income the State of Connecticut and its businesses received from our time celebrating there. I am not expecting reimbursement.

These may sound like dour associations when most people are thinking of bells, fancy dress, dancing, and acquiring housewares, but I am jazzed by making the legal observation of our already established relationship an occasion for increased political awareness and hopeful progress. I hope you will join us in that celebration.

Mystery as Cure (Books - Memory Book by Howard Engel)

Memory Book by Howard Engel, in which detective Benny Cooperman awakens in a rehabilitation hospital unable to read but not to write (alexia sine agraphia) and unable to remember anything about the hit on the head that put him there, finished relatively grippingly. I had felt that the initial stages of the mystery were held back by the fact that the writing of the book was an exercise that author Howard Engel used to help in his adjustment to life with alexia sine agraphia (see my first post on this book). But having given over to this conceit, I ended up enjoying detective Cooperman and his cast of characters. Engel managed in the book's second half to ramp up both the pace and the suspense, and even to conclude with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek drawing room scene in which the detective assembles his suspects and reveals the answer to the mystery.

There were a few moments during which the hybrid nature of the novel ended up getting too cute, as for example, which Benny learns of the nature of his illness from his brother Sam, a physician, and replies

Sounds like a case for that American doctor, the one who wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

As Engel was a patient of Oliver Sacks, the author of that book, and indeed wrote the afterword for this one, I found the joke a little sophomoric. I was most taken with the writing, some of it quite eloquent, about this experience of being a patient with alexia and amnesia.

There are all kinds of sleep - refreshing all-nighters, fender-bending nightmares, catnaps, and deep oblivion - but for a sleep that gathers you up, seduces you, and turns off your lights there is nothing quite like hospital sleep. Sleep, the seductress of my waking hours, watched me closely, knew my weaknesses, held out lurid promises...

[...]

Then there were voices, far away, against an echoing background. I can't reproduce the words, not the exact words, one never can in a dream, but there were two voices talking about drugs and their cost. One voice, an English-accented voice, was telling the other not to be daft, that she shouldn't play at knowing what she was doing without measuring the cost. "Ecstasy," she said. "Have you lost your tiny mind?" The other voice was younger, guarding her ignorance with bluster.

"What's the harm?" Where had I heard such talk? Were they nurses talking near my bed? Right now, as I slept? Or were they seeds from my memory, dropped like acorns from my resting brain? Was it a fragment of another time and place?

Engel also allowed the pseudo-hardboiled detective banter of Cooperman to do double-duty as sarcasm about his illness.

"This is the real Sheila Kerzon. The imposter was Heather Nesbitt, her roommate. And, in a minute, without a net, I'm going to see if I can guess my own name."

I can only imagine that must have been liberating, and this reader some indication of the frustrating struggle that must have been behind the recovery from this illness that is belied by the creation of a detective novel while not being able to read!

Mystery of himself (Books - Memory Book by Howard Engel)

I first learned of Howard Engel in A Man of Letters, a chapter in Oliver Sacks latest book The Mind's Eye, about a man whose stroke leaves him unable to read but not to write (alexia sine agraphia). This would be limiting for most adults, but is tragic for Engel who is a mystery writer. In Memory Book (2006) the detective of many of his mysteries - Benny Cooperman - awakens in a rehabilitation hospital, himself the victim of alexia sine agraphia due to a bop on the head. He must solve the mystery of how he got to be that way. What case was he solving, who hit him, and why? But before that, he must solve more pressing mysteries of how to make sense of the strange blobs on a page that he knows are letters which make words.

I looked around me blankly. I could see everything I could normally see. I saw the nurse, the curtains, the bump of my knees under the covers. Through the window, I could see the hospital across the street. There was nothing wrong with my vision. What's-Her-Name reached over to the folded newspaper by the window and handed it to me. I picked up the first section and opened it. I looked at it in disbelief. It could have been written in Serbo-Croatian or Portuguese or Greek. I couldn't make out the words. I squinted hard at the front page, recognizing the logo of The Globe and Mail. It was English, but the words below were foreign. My hands began to shake. Again I squinted hard; I could make out most of the letters - I saw "The" and "and" - but the normal black-and-white words kept their secrets from me...

Each time he awakens and meets someone, he must solve the mystery of how long has past since the last time he saw them, and whether he has already said to them the things he is saying, as he is also amnesiac. Benny Cooperman learns that he is repeating himself. He can't seem to hang onto the names of people, even with the "memory book" the hospital provides him.

This books reads as though Engel was using the writing, at least in part, as an exercise in recovery, which lends the book considerable professional interest for me as a neuropsychologist-in- training, but doesn't do much for the average pleasures of mystery reading. That part of the book I'm finding rather slow going. But Engel, no doubt, is finding his re-vamped visual system and memory of more immediate interest than plotting another book in the Benny Cooperman series. As such, I found his descriptions of building new routes to access old memories fascinating, and the delightful thing about the conceit of the mystery form his has chosen, is that he must imagine how that same experience would affect his detective Benny Cooper.

It was going to be a peculiar life, I had to admit: part of my old memory worked - I could still remember about the Battle of Hastings and when Julius Caesar crossed his Rubicon - but I could no longer remember the names of my many first cousins. While I was trying to list all sixteen of them, I had the haunting feeling that I had done this before. I didn't so much mind the duplication of the work as I did the feeling that I was looking over my own shoulder to see what was going on. I could remember Anna and her father, but I had lost his first name, And in order to remember his last name, I had to go back to Anna's, which, of course, was the same. I kept surprising myself with my own ingenuity; for instance, I was trying to recall the name Grant for some reason. I spent ten minutes going through the alphabet searching for the name. I succeeded only when I remembered that I'd once worked for a Saul Granofsky, whose daughters had changed their name to Grant. My memory was full of such filigrees of twisted silken strands. My new memory required me to build a latticework of aids to criss-cross my experience and expectation.

It remains to be seen how the mysteries, both of them, turn out. I'll keep you posted.

Probing the experience of seeing (Books - The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks)

I have always enjoyed Oliver Sacks's vivid, humane portraits. He is a doctor/author who has always managed to write about people instead of cases and in none of his books is that better exemplified than in The Mind's Eye, in which Sacks's experience of his own eye tumor is the subject of one of the pieces.

Each chapter in this latest collection focuses on a person whose visual system is somehow compromised or enhanced. I say visual system rather than eye because most of what we experience as 'seeing' is accomplished by the central nervous system. The retina, which is the curved screen upon which our lens focuses the light entering our eye, and that forms the back wall of our eye, is actually part of the CNS. It's like a little piece of brain that hangs by a stalk (the optic nerve). The characters of The Mind's Eye include a pianist who loses the ability to read music, a mystery writer who looses the ability to read words (but not to write them), and several people who are selectively blind for faces but not necessarily for other classes of objects. There is a chapter devoted to stereoscopy, or how the brain combines the images from our two two-dimensional retinas to create an illusion of three-dimensional space. In this case, a woman with life-long strabismus, who could not see in three dimensions because she viewed the world through one eye at a time, gains the ability to see in 3-D. I found this section particularly charming, not so much for the case study but because of the fact that Dr. Sacks, having developed an interest in stereoscopes in his childhood, built himself several:

So when, at the age of ten, I developed a passion for photography, I wanted, of course, to make my own pairs of stereo photos. This was easy to do, by moving the camera horizontally about two-and-a-half inches between exposures, mimicking the distance between the two eyes. (I did not yet have a double-lens stereo camera, which would take simultaneous stereo pairs).

After reading how Wheatstone explored stereoscopic effects by exaggerating or reversing the disparity between the two images, I began experimenting with this, too. I started taking pictures with greater and greater separations between them, and then I made a hyperstereoscope, using a cardboard tube about a yard long with four little mirrors. With this, I could turn myself, in effect, into a creature with eyes a yard apart. I could look through the hyperstereoscope at a very distant object, like the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, which normally appeared as a flat semicircle on the horizon, and see it in its full rotundity, projecting towards me.

We were able to have fun before television and the internet! Sacks's memoir, Uncle Tungsten, is full of such examples of himself or members of his family pursuing their curiosity about the world's flora, fauna, and physical phenomena, through active research. I delight in the fact that Sacks was a member of the New York Stereoscopic Society prior to his own eye troubles (not to mention the American Fern Society and the New York Mineralogical Club, both mentioned in his bio). The fact that Sacks pursues his curiosities so avidly, whether about people or phenomena, is reflected in the way he listens to and relates the stories of his patients.

Through his case histories, Sacks also writes on how the brain evolved the skill of reading if it wasn't "designed to" do so, how our eyes take in surfaces and the boundaries between them but the brain constructs"objects" from them, the von Helmholz and Young theories of color vision, and how the brain is able to fill in holes in the visual field - both those naturally occurring in our blind spot (the place where the optic nerve exits from the retina) - and those created by injury or illness. Sacks's description of his own loss of vision is particularly evocative. He communicates through it not only how the brain constructs what we perceive from the cues the eyes collect, but also how the limits of the eye produce a different experience for the brain. When Sacks loses the peripheral visual field of one of his eyes to a tumor, he not only cannot see that portion of space, he seems to lose his awareness that it exists at all.

Kate and I finished our walk and headed back to my office. I walked ahead and got inot the elevator - but Kate had vanished. I presumed she was talking to the doorman or checking the mail, and waited for her to catch up. Then a voice to my right - her voice - said, " What are we waiting for?" I was dumbfounded - not just that I had failed to see her to my right, but that I had even failed to imagine her being there, because "there" did not exist for me.

The last chapter, which lends its title to the book, was most interesting to me. Mental imagery is a particular interest of mine. Sacks writes of neural plasticity (the reassignment of new functions to neural real estate). For example the reallocation of parts of the visual cortex to either hearing or touch for those who are blind. Or the science-fiction like work of neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita , who takes advantage of such flexibility by connecting the output of a video camera, point-by-point to a grid on one of the most sensitive part of the human body - the tongue. Such a device enables blind people to walk across a room avoiding obstacles, to catch a ball rolled toward them, and make other such perceptual judgments not previously afforded them. Are these people "seeing," Sacks asks? Whether exploring case studies, the evolution of neuroscience, or more recent avances, Sacks's writing is probing, accessible, and humane in The Mind's Eye.

Can a computer be smart or can it only be programmed to act that way? (Books - Final Jeopardy by Stephen Baker)

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Maching and the Quest to know Everything concerns itself with the stunt planned by IBM to program a computer to play Jeopardy against human contestants. But Stephen Baker’s swift moving book doesn’t merely reveal backstage gossip like why the computer was named Watson or who designed his 'face,' the real reason to read this book is the story Baker tells about the nature of intelligence and whether machines can possess and use it.

 Baker, as IBM did, used the contest as a scaffold. For IBM this narrowed the scope of their research and imposed a schedule. For Baker it lent his narrative thrust toward a conspicuous end. It's almost a shame that we know the outcome, the contest having already been aired, but Baker writes well enough to squeeze suspense out of the story by connecting us to the stakes experienced by scientist David Ferrucci, and his team of programmers, designers, former Jeopardy contestants, and, of course, the public relations armies for IBM and Jeopardy.

I enjoyed Baker's lay-descriptions of the evolution of computing machines and how they differ from human brains: what kind of knowledge goes into them, what sorts of computations can be expected of them, what kinds of mistakes they make, how computers can learn and how we, in turn, can learn about the nature of intelligence through the exercise of programming them to do so.

For certain types of questions, Ferrucci said, a search engine could come up with answers. These were simple sentences with concrete results, what he and his team called factoids. For example: "What is the tallest mountain in Africa?" A search engine would pick out the three key words from that sentence and in a fraction of a second suggest Kenya's 19,340-foot-high Kilimanjaro. This worked, Ferrucci said, for about 30 percent of Jeopardy questions. But performance at that low level would condemn Watson to defeat at the hands of human amateurs.

Baker is adept at explaining how fact-based knowledge can be stored in and retrieved from the neural networks of the human brain. Key to his story about so-called artificial intelligence, he makes clear the difference between designing a machine that actually performs the steps of human-like cognitive processes in a silicon medium rather than an organic one versus one that looks as though it is problem-solving like a person, but is actually coming up with the answer via different processes.

Equally interesting was the discussion Baker's book provokes about what knowledge is for. This highlights the poverty of Ferrucci's tightly-focused imagination.

"You can probably fit all the books that are on sale on about two terabytes that you can buy at OfficeMax for a couple of hundred dollars. You get every book. Every. Single. Book. Now what do you do? You can't read them all! What I want the computer to do," he went on, "is to read them for me and tell me what they're about, and answer my questions about them. I want this for all information. I want machines to read, understand, summarize, describe the themes, and do the analysis so that I can take advantage of all the knowledge that's out there. We human's need help. I know I do!" 

Actually, you can't get all the information period, and the best computer can't either, so calm down, David. Knowledge is not just possessing facts, nor is it analyzing them. Analysis takes place at multiple levels. Merely determining which units within a narrative are the facts is itself analysis. And just what are facts: what are the facts of Oliver Twist, for example? Is Fagin a fact? Is the theft of a pocket handkerchief a fact? Is “some more?” Facts and the juicy stuff that can be derived from them are determined by an intersection with the point-of-view of the individual using them.

To be fair, Ferrucci understands these limitations and his project embraces the challenge of finding a solution. Ultimately, the machines that we can imagine now will likely be better at generating lists for hypothesis development than they will be at making inferential leaps. The gains made in problem solving by sudden departures from the knowledge tree or standard method are legendary - that's the 'creative' part of creative problem solving and is the very stuff of the creative leap that so often precedes a solution.

Other scientists, such as Joshua Tenebaum at MIT think that one day computers will generate concepts and make inductive leaps, but that is hard to imagine reading Baker’s account of parsing the words of a single Jeopardy question well enough to determine the category of knowledge to search (let alone to answer it). A great deal more than computing speed is necessary before computers can accurately comprehend human emotion, make inferences, and take control from their inventors like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tenenbaum said it best:

"If you want to compare [artificial intelligence] to the space program, we're at Galileo," Tenenbaum said. "We're not yet at Newton." 

Baker's book is thoughtful, informative, and really amusing, without being pseudo-science. I'm passing my copy along to my Uncle who was a contestant on Jeopardy in the 1970s. I think he should get a kick out of it.

Tellings stories to keep a son alive (Books - To the End of the Land by David Grossman)

When Ora's son Ofer decides to stay beyond his required military service in the Israeli army to serve in an important military mission rather than hike with her in the Galilee, Ora feels hurt and deserted. She commandeers Avram, her husband's best friend and her old love, who has been living on the fringes since his capture and torture in the Yom Kippur War, to hike with her in a desperate act of avoidance. If she is not there to receive the news that Ofer has been killed, she reasons, he is not dead. She can indefinitely keep him alive by telling the stories of Ofer, his brother Adam, his father Ilan, and herself, to Avram. This is story telling as an act of defense. People approached with love are bottomless, says David Grossman's powerful new novel To the End of the Land, no matter how much you know, there is still more. This act of desperate story telling doubles as an act of intimacy, because Avram has missed out on Ofer's childhood, refusing to see him even though he is actually Ofer's father.

Thousands of moments and hours and days, millions of deeds, countless actions and attempts and mistakes and words and thoughts, all to make one person in the world.

She reads it to Avram.

"He'll be fine, you'll see. We're making it so he'll be fine."

[...]

"One person, who is so easy to destroy. Write that."

He writes.

This book, in some ways, is nothing more than the act of trying to capture a life, hold it still so one can appreciate its beauty, yet those things that make it most beautiful aren't there when you hold them still. Grossman captures both the sweetness and regret which, for Ora turns to loss, when Ofer returns to the army. He writes with directness that is visceral, delicate, and complex.

Two decades earlier, in the garden at night, in the middle of hanging up the boys' clothes, Ilan had walked through the crowded lines and hugged her, and they had both rocked together, entangled in the damp laundry, laughing softly, sighing lovingly, and Ilan had whispered in her ear, "Isn't it, Orinkah? Isn't it the fullness of life?" She had hugged him as hard as she could, with a salty happiness pulsing in her throat and had felt that for one fleeting moment she had caught it as it rushed through her, the secret of the fruitful years, their tidal motion, and their blessing in her body and his, and in their two little children and in the house they had built for themselves, and in their love, which finally, after years of wandering and hesitating, and after the blow of Avram's tragedy, was now, it seemed, standing up on its own two feet.

At the same time, Ora and Avram, walk a trail that circumnavigates their country, acquiring a knowledge of their country which neither of them had had before. Grossman does not makes this Israel a symbolic or one-sided representation, it includes Jew and Palestinian,peacenik, military zealot, and those who are ambivalent and tormented by guilt . The others they encounter on the trail - the hippy guru and his followers, a widowed Dr. interviewing each person he meets on the trail, and particularly the wild dog which ends up becoming subdued as she follows them, give the tail a classic epic quality. The dog, particularly, seemed almost the mirror spirit of Ora herself - from wild to domestic, as Ora profresses from domestic to wild.

We come to know all the characters in To the End of the Land deeply and richly. Many others have written about the monumental creation of Ora, comparing her to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, so I thought I would focus my thoughts on Avram, also a strikingly well-written, uncliched character, who strongly evoked a few intensely creative misfits I have known in my life. He seemed a creative act of love and I wondered of his origins. Admirable and pitiable. A deeply original spirit, instilling the love of others, but not because he is physically attractive. Rather because he is prolific, brilliant, playful, but also deeply afraid, childish, demanding, his brilliance finally holding others at a distance.

"Even before Ofer was born, ever since the war, since you came back, I've lived with the feeling that I'm always being watched by you."

There. She'd told him what for years had embittered and sweetened her life at the same time.

"Watched how?"

"In your thoughts, in your eyes, I don't know. Watched."

There were days - but of course she will not tell him this, not now - when she felt that at each and every moment, from the second she opened her eyes in the morning, through every motion she made, every laugh she laughed, when she walked and when she lay in bed with Ilan, she was acting a part in his play, in some made sketch was writing. And that she was acting for him perhaps more than for herself.

"What is there to understand here?" She stops and suddenly turns around and unwillingly hurls at him: "It's something Ilan and I felt all the time, all those years - that we were acting out a play on your stage."

This is a potent scene, perhaps the one that stayed with me most even after nearly 600 pages of text. In some ways, Avram took on the spirit of Israel in the book - an alluring, inspiring presence that elicits the passion of others, but also consumes them to protect itself.

It is impossible to read David Grossman's To the End of the Land now without knowing that, while writing it, his son Uri was killed while doing his military service. In some ways To the End of the Land is a deeply political work. Born of grief and anger at continued aggression as the only solution. There is a particularly memorable segment in the book that struck me as arising from the madness of grief. Set around a series of bus bombings, Ora compulsively rides the buses, trying to fit herself into the head (perhaps) of a bomber.

However, despite its length and sweep, and its complex reckoning with the legacy of war upon which the existence of that nation (some say) survives, Grossman's book finally treats Israel as a character, and in so doing becomes an intimate work. One about the struggle to encompass the complexity of others deeply.

Here is my other post about To the End of the Land.