The courage to question what we live for (Books - Appassionata by Eva Hoffman)

I read Eva Hoffman's thoughtful novel Appassionata while on my trip. It concerns Isabel Merton, a concert pianist, whose encounter with Anzor a passionate Chechen exile, leads her to question her life as an artist, one tuned to suit her needs for temperature control, practice on world-class instruments, solitary time before curtain in which she cultivates vulnerability - one in which seriousness is served by intense self-focus and in which such self-focus produces results that music lovers the world over value deeply.

She's free, free as a woman has ever been. Freedom is the element through which she moves, and she peers into it as into a milky fog, trying to discern what she is moving toward, what she so restlessly, so keenly desires. And yet maybe the man is right, maybe there's something hard about her life, in its deluxe later-capitalist way. She thinks of the stages she will have to cross before reaching the piano, the interviews, she'll have to give, the dinners she's promised to attend. Bourgeois heroism is what Peter calls it, the acrobatics of being in so many places practically at once, and doing so many amazing things in one day, and then conversing over dinner with unflagging energy. She'll have to be on the qui vive, it is expected. You must never be tired. You Must Love Your Life.

Although there are a few key events, this book's conflicts and action are largely internal. Anzor is indeed the mirror image of Isabel:

"...my country has been very hurt. Very damaged." An odd expression crosses his face, a setting of the jaw, a hooding of the eyes, as if to fend off vulnerability, or a private anger..."Not that I didn't want to leave when I was young," he resumes. "Or at least to travel. I felt so...restricted. To tell you the truth, I was almost excited when I was forced to leave. I was going to see the world."

"And Now?" she asks.

"Now I've seen it," he says tersely. "Now I think about my country. My mission."

The contrast couldn't be clearer, in fact, I sometimes found the clarity a bit pedantic. Isabel was richly drawn, and her combination of qualities fully believable, but I found Anzor somewhat illustrative of a position taken to fuel the conflict of this story. But Hoffman evokes their relationship with tenderness as well as tension and what she really accomplishes beautifully in this story, and this is key, is making Isabel's work serious and valuable so that her conflict becomes our own.

Hoffman has big talent for writing characters with powerfully motivating interior engines (even when they are externally quiet, as is true of Isabel's ex - Peter). She seems to me less precise with the details of her diction. Either she has a taste for or does not police her use of cliche:

Music which was nothing but shaped yearning, fierceness, lament, praise, lust. Blood, sweat and tears.

or

"But that music expresses our very own, special character, " he asserts, his eyes flashing. Yes, his eyes flash.

So, okay, perhaps she is conscious of her use of cliche - but its mustiness and imprecision occasionally pulled me out of this otherwise erudite and involving story.

Hoffman pits Isabel's internal struggle against the artistry of two other musicians, one her mentor, Wolfe, whose journals she reads throughout the course of the story, and the other a fellow disciple of Wolfe, Jane Robbins. In Jane we find the artistic opposite of Isabel, carefree where Isabel is careful, naive where Isabel is sophisticated, enthusiastic where Isabel is restrained. The passages in the journal are marvelous ventriloquism - the spirit of the opinionated charismatic guru artist is pitch-perfect , and some of the entries are downright hilarious.

A lesson with the cellist today. Jane Robbins, Admit it, old man, these young women pose a challenge to you. They vex your critical criteria. This one is particularly provoking. She burst into the studio almost rudely, with a wide white-toothed smile. Her breasts were bouncing freely underneath her blouse. There is something aggravating about the way she picks up her bow, as if it were a baseball bat. when I pointed this out, she informed me that she is "a very physical person," and has played not only baseball but basketball and girls' hockey in high school. She would have gone on without any self-consciousness, had I not interrputed. As far as I can tell, she has no inhibitions. She is like a big happy child who hasn't yet learned it may not be allowed to do everything it wants. She hurtled through the first movement of the Dvorak as if on a roller coaster, from one burst of excitement to another. Of course, it is an old warhorse and there was undeniable energy in her playing. But nothing else. No restraint, no tension, no wistfulness. Just this unrestrained...enthusiasm...She plays as if milking an ever-compliant cow.

Wonderful writing. What Hofmann creates in interleaving the journal entries about Isabel's artistic education, with this story about her as a mature artist, is multiple layers of awareness about the same person which resonate with each other in a way that evokes the harmonies and dissonances of a musical composition. I will not tell you whether the central tension of the novel is resolved, the pleasure is in accompanying Isabel on her struggle and finding out. Appassionata probes the contexts of art, and history - among the strong forces that motivate what we live for - and presents in Isabel a courageous character, in that she is willing to question mid-career why she does what she does and whether it is meaningful. A rich and entertaining read.

Magic and a case of the cutesie-wootsies (Books - The Chronicles of Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne Jones)

Every so often I find it fun to dip into a the ya fantasy genre, and so Diana Wynne Jones's The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, including both Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant, came with me on my trip. They were both written in the tried and true mold - insecure child is left parentless, through his hardships discovers he has magical powers which makes he strong although he learns it is also a burden, wars are fought and won... you know, the usual. These serve as useful metaphors to the trials of what it feels like to be a child without being to directly preechy.

Gwendolyn gave vent to her fury in her room after dinner. She jumped on her bed and threw cushions about, screaming. Cat stood prudently back against the wall waiting for her to finish. But Gwendolyn did not finish until she had pledged herself to a campaign against Chrestomanci.

Gwendolyn and Cat are the parentless children, he's the insecure one and she become the force to be reckoned with. He's a cat, so he has nine lives, there end up being parallel universes, all interesting plot ideas to be sure. The trouble for my money is that Cat was blandly passive and unsure and Gwendolyn was such a cliched bad witch/tantrumy child that I remained unconvinced of his uncertainty or her evil. Had her anger been convincing, I could have gotten caught up in the story but the cleaned-up, televisiony exaggeration of emotions and twee style of narration left me lightly entertained but uninvolved. I'm not sure what a genuine kid would think about it. They might have a grand time, but this book left me wondering why so many writers for children pander to them. It is possible to write stories kids want to read that treat them intelligently - Sonia Hartnett is a whiz at it.

Recent acquisitions department

Our stay in London included the addition of a few new goodies I thought I'd share. They were acquired at the personable Primrose Hill Books, a recommendation of Thomas's, and a good one - thanks Thomas! We chose to walk to get there, which took us from the Wellcome Collection's excellent exhibit on Dirt (yes, Dirt. We've found this venue on the Euston Road well worth a visit on our last two trips to London), through Camden which has a lively High Street, past the canal adjacent to the London Zoo, and then up Regent's Park Road which turns into Primrose Hill's main drag. This has the feel of a charming village street within a city (something like New York's Park Slope), with abundant shops and restaurants, the book shop, and places to buy things for a picnic if you want to walk up the hill and take in the well-known view of London.

After forty minutes or so in the shop, I had narrowed down my take to:

I had heard of author Rosamond Lehmann but have never read anything of hers and was not familiar with this novel, The Ballad and the Source. It seems to be a dark gothic myth of revenge written during World War II. If it were a film, it looks more like Jean Cocteau would make it than Hitchcock. I may need for the weather to turn cold again before I read this one.

Naomi Alderman's The Lessons has the evil, seductive feel of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, only set in Oxford rather than a small American college. I had not heard of this novel when it was released. She quotes Cavafy in the epigraph, so it can't be all that bad. It looks like it could be an addictive read and I'm looking forward to one or two of those this summer.

I love Hilary Mantel's writing and A Change of Climate looks like it might be challenging. It concerns a couple who were missionaries in Africa and who begin to adopt orphans as a way not to see the crises going on in their own family. At least that's what I gather from the blurb.


A retired teacher tries to get rid of an evil investor who has built an ugly new
development in her village. Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett looks as if it pits the eccentric individual against homogenous corporate greed, I hope to good effect.

The drudgery of field science reveals abundant evidence for the mechanisms of evolution (Books - The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner)

We've been back from vacation for almost a week but it has taken me until now to get back to writing. Our trip to the Dordogne, Paris, London, and Sussex allowed for far less reading than is typical of my vacations, but we did see The Cherry Orchard at the National Theatre in London, Die Meistersinger and L'Elisir D'Amore at Glyndebourne, and saw a wonderful new 3-D documentary film by Wim Wenders about the late choreographer Pina Bausch called Pina which I recommend looking out for. In addition, we drank some terrific wine, ate splendidly, saw some impressive chateaux - all in all, a lovely time.

Amidst all this, I finally had time to finish Jonathan Weiner's splendid The Beak of the Finch - a rich book detailing the work that evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant have done on the Galapagos Islands. They have observed Darwin's theory of natural selection play out again and again and, in some cases, even observed how new species evolve, by watching the islands' famous finches.

It is the twenty-fifth of January, 1991. There are four hundred finches on the island at this moment, and the Grants know every one of the birds on sight, the way shepherds can tell every sheep in their flocks. In other years there have been more than a thousand finches on Daphne Major, and Peter and Rosemary could still recognize each one. The lock was down to three hundred once. The number is falling toward that now. The birds have gotten less than a fifth of an inch of rain the the last forty-four months: in 1,320 days, 5 millimeters of rain.

The Grants, and the Grants' young daughters, and a long line of assistants, keep coming back to this desert island like sentries on a watch. They have been observing Daphne Major for almost two decades, or about twenty generations of finches.

Aside from the pleasure of his lucid writing, Weiner elucidates the development of Darwin's own thinking as well as integrating his original work with that of contemporary scientists observing the forces of evolution in action. This book makes plain the great theory's relevance to the natural world in which we live and also reveals the unbelievable drudgery of painstaking observational field work. Holy cow. Months upon successive months on a small hot island of rock and guano, measuring finch beaks and seeds per square meter of island.

Peter Grant combined the measurements of seed size and seed hardness and rated each kind of birdseed as the finches might themselves, in a sort of Struggle Index. The small soft ones of Portulaca score lowest on this index, only 0.35. The big hard seeds of Cordia lutea score highest, almost 14. Any of the finches can handle Portulaca in its beak, but very few are up to Cordia.

The Grant team also kept a census of the numbers of each kind of seed on the lava. To do this objectively they used a random-number table to select a single plot of lava, one meter square, somewhere in each grid. Then they counter every single fruit and seed they could find on that square of lava, whether it was dangling from the top of a cactus tree or lying in the middle of a cactus patch. Next they chose a much smaller plot within that square meter, again at random, and they sifted the hot cindery soil, collecting every fruit and every seed they found. Finally they withdrew to their tents and spread out their trophies on white trays to count one by one. And they repeated the whole routine fifty times...

"People think fieldwork is so romantic," Boag says, "but a lot of it is real slog. This was absolutely the worst."

Seed hardness and beak size are important because, in certain environmental situations the length of a beak determines how much food a finch can access to get it through a dry season and a miniscule difference in size is literally the difference between living and dying in these cases. As Weiner so emphatically puts it:

...the birds were not simply magnified by the drought: they were reformed and revised. They were changed by their dead. Their beaks were carved by their losses.

But I have to say, my skin shrivels up just thinking about the work they did. Then again, the Grants might think the same of my measuring the brainwaves of 6 year old children. Weiner conveys the passion the Grants have about their data and the great satisfaction of seeing such painstaking collection and patient calculation yield a story, otherwise their slog would be the reader's as well.

The isolated Galapagos archipelago precipitated Darwin's theory because they hosted many unique creatures that clearly bore a resemblance to relatives on the South American mainland and a fossil record of extinct relatives of those living forms existed

to help reveal a Law of succession that links the living to the dead, the same law that links the fossils of one stratum of rock to the fossils in the strata below...

"It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many others, could be explained on the supposition that species gradually become modified"

Of course, the story of Darwin's monumental deduction has been told again and again. What is different about Weiner's book is that he observes contemporary scientists, the Grants, as well as their students, many of whom develop into credible scientists in their own right, collect the evidence needed to confirm the original hypotheses. The argument has been made time and again against evolution that the workings of natural selection and sexual selection cannot be observed, that the processes necessarily takes thousands of years and so one is left only being able to infer it from the trail of fossils left behind, as Darw.in did. They also argue that it is impossible to make quantitative predictions based on data in nature, i.e., "proof" is not possible. However, both of these statements are incorrect. The lifespan of many species is short enough to observe the infinitesimal changing of the frequency of a particular feature across a species in response to both the physical characteristics of the environment they inhabit and the amount of competition they face from similar other creatures, and how these small variations can diverge into new species under certain conditions. This is exactly what the Grants's work with finches as well as Endler's with guppies reveals. Furthermore, the Grants have successfully made quantitative predictions based on their work, and over time have seen them to be correct. Weiner is particularly strong in making clear how this can result from an undirected process of random mutations in individual animals. Weiner's talent for writing about natural science is making that story as palpable as well as exciting to the reader.

Weiner has a particularly good chapter on resistance, not only of certain ideological groups to teaching of evolution but also the resistance of moths or ticks to insecticide or E. coli to antibiotics. This is a particularly important part of the story, in my view, because it makes clear the ubiquity of evolution as it impacts our daily lives and the importance of seeing that a basic understanding of the process is gained in the general populace, as billions of dollars are thrown at developing insecticides and antibiotics when biology has clearly shown us that these are only temporary solutions. Bacteria and insects will not cease to evolve and eradication will not be achieved by these means. The target is always moving and these solutions are leading to more and more successfully resistant strains of streptococcus, tuberculosis, salmonella, pneumococcal pneumonia, and gonorrhea. We ignore the lessons of evolutionary biology at our own peril, so if you would like to read a book that depicts the mechanisms of this great theory via abundant example and does so in a style that feels very much like a good adventure story, I would recommend The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner.

Vacation Time for me and Contest for You

We're about to head off on vacation (at last!) with, in my case, a pile of books, walking shoes, and a good appetite. I'm looking forward to attacking at least the following:




Here is one picture for each of our destinations. List our itinerary (only the region of the country is necessary in the first case, but the specific locations are needed in the other three), and I'll enter you in a drawing to win a book about destinations exotic (Burma, Russia, and Serbia are among the possible choices so far). You can live anywhere. Put your answer in the comments and I'll read them when I return.

Meditating on Matisse (Books - Blue Arabesque by Patricia Hampl)

I've been wending my way through another of Patricia Hampl's books, following her lovely and insightful I Could Tell You Stories and, although there are stops along the journey where I enjoy the view, I'm much less taken with Blue Arabesque. I Could Tell You Stories was a perfect marriage of form and content. While it was a book about art, specifically the autobiographical form, it was itself a memoir, whereas Blue Arabesque, while also about art, and also a memoir, is about painting. Its subject is Henri Matisse's odalisques, and as in her previous book, Hampl builds outward from the quiet and thorough contemplation of a single subject. The difference here is a lack of expertise. While Hampl is a writer and an autobiographer, she is not a painter, and her observations, though often beautifully written and intelligent, feel touristic.

A painting must depict the act of seeing, not the object seen. Even if that object represents an entire exotic world, it must pass through the veil of the self to be realized - to be art. For it is the artist's fully engaged sensibility - mind/heart/soul - that is really at stake for modernity. For all the critical complaint about the narcissism of modern artists, the twentieth century demanded self-absorption of its great ones: Don't give us your skills, give us your attitude. We have wanted to look not at the thing but at the mind beholding and rendering itself in the act of attention.

This self-absorption, or self-refection - to be more friendly about it, is what I had liked in Hampl's first book, but somehow I feel here like there is too little of her here. I'm just being lectured about art. In this case, it's art Hampl doesn't know all that much about (although she does not pretend otherwise). The literature and episodes from her own life Hampl does include feel less integrated into the work as a whole. Perhaps I should have allowed more time between her books so that my expectations of the second wasn't quite so primed by my experience of reading the first. Hampl remains a talented writer, so I may yet give her another try.

Speaking aloud our secrets (Books - I Could Tell You Stories by Patricia Hampl)

Patricia Hampl has made art of contemplation through writing. Her collection of essays I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory sift through the subjects of self and narrative, turning them over and over as one would a favorite stone. Two sorts of essays emerge from this act. One sort look at how ordinary life is lifted to the light, beheld as beautiful or horrible, in the act of writing about our own and others' lives, an act that is always irrevocable. Others observe poetry or prose in the act of encapsulating, of speaking for us of the revelations that we were sure were private and uniquely ours. She considers both sorts memoir - literary narrative creations of self, and yet works of non-fiction.

I haven't read really good pieces about the acts of reading, writing and how they are important to our lives in some time. Reading Hampl often evoked for me the experience of reading Virginia Woolf's essays, though her subject matter is more contemporary, she can be funnier, and she writes out of an era that has broken with the kind of formal literary cannon Woolf reckoned with and bucked against.

A writer is, first and last, a reader. Who do you write for? Gertrude Stein was asked, and famously replied, "Myself and strangers." That self, the reader-self who is allied with strangers, may be a writer's better half, more detached, more trustworthy, than the writing self who swaggers through a lifetimes of prose. It is difficult - and diminishing - to separate the self who writes from the one who reads. Both acts belong to the communion of the word, which is a writer's life.

Her opening invitation is to revel in this communion - which is the action of the essays that follow. They attempt to distinguish the act of making memoir from making fiction:

Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to "tell a story." They want to tell it all...Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story.

and to separate the act of reading from writing. This may sound a trifle simplistic, but it is an important consideration if one's job becomes to write. Having taught art making process for years, it is an essential early act in the formation of that thing artists call technique. Future actors approach their profession from having first sat in the audience, just as future writers approached theirs through reading. It is usually difficult to abandon one's lifelong habit of admiration for one of the strange actions that embody the artist's daily routine.

I think of the reader as a cat, endlessly fastidious, capable by turns of mordant indifference and riveted attention, luxurious, recumbent, ever poised. whereas the writer is absolutely a dog, panting and moping, too eager for an affectionate scratch behind the ears, lunging frantically after any old stick thrown in the distance.

I think the term "alchemy" has been overused to exemplify an artistic synthesis of disparate influences into a new and surprising whole, yet I can think of no better metaphor for Hampl's accomplishment in her essay The Mayflower Moment. It combines the act of reading Walt Whitman's poems at lunch following the filling of her first birth control pill prescription, with the cauldron year of 1968 in which that took place, with the contemporary remembering of that act and a reconsideration of those poems.

I settled into the Reuben sandwich which, though big enough for two, was going to feed just one and no doubt about it now. I picked up the book (always bring a book to the doctor's office; they always make you wait: the wisdom of my mother - who didn't know about this doctor's appointment). I propped the book between the sugar dispenser and the plate, and I read and ate and was happy in my new high-tech body.

Holy cow, what a precise, relationship-filled, hilarious, and ultimate appropriate paragraph to usher in a serious reading of the premier poet of America's individualist creed! Her reading becomes a celebration of Whitman's powerful interaction with his reader. It begins with his direct address to his reader, his specific instructions for where one should be when reading, and his ultimate act of transmogrification of self into book:

Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man...

Self transformation, and the literary form that that transformation takes - autobiography, poetry, fiction that acts to either revel in or obviate the self - is the refrain of Hampl's compelling contemplation. She considers, for example, the transformation of of Edith Stein, German Jewish philosopher, whose controversial spiritual transformation to a nun of the Carmelite order does not exclude her from murder by the Nazis at Auschwitz.

"The self is the individual's way of structuring experience." Self was necessary - but not for itself. It was necessary as the experiencer of "phenomena," of reality as it is absorbed by a life. Self was meant, in a real sense, to be lost. A kind of blessed anonymity attended the most genuine life, the most realized self.

Hampl reads Sylvia Plath's Ariel as embodying the very act of spiritual transformation, in a passionate essay I found hard to fully enter, so relentlessly was it colored by Hampl's Catholic upbringing. Yet I admired its brilliance and the apropos trinity of writers which she considered - Plath, Simone Weil, and Franz Kafka (although Kafka gets much more air time in a later essay) - all of whose writing was born of devotion to their suffering, which is, I suppose, itself an act of contemplation.

Narrative born of anguish, whether spiritual suffering or the horrors of the Holocaust, is another motif in Hampl's collection as she considers the original autobiographer - St. Augustine, the poet Czeslaw Milosz, and diarist Anne Frank in three separate essays. I found her short Chinese-mirror of-a-piece about the difficulty of writing a review of Anne Frank's iconic book a revelation about writing process. In it, she considers Anne Frank in the context of writing her diary and her reading of poet John Berryman's essay about Anne Frank's diary which unblocks her stuck process of writing a review of a new edition of The Diary of Anne Frank. I love what she says about her enjoyment of writing book reviews:

Reviewing has never struck me as having much to do with assigning scores or handing out demerits. The reviewer's job - and pleasure - is akin to any reader's. It is the pleasure of talk. If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance.

Indeed, that conversation is what draws me here to write this and, I hope, you to read it. Hampl's final essay considers the consequences of writing memoirs about real people, rather than fiction.

What memory "sees," it must regard through the image-making faculty of the mind. The parallel lines of memory and imagination cross finally and collide in narrative. The casualty is the dead body of privacy lying smashed on the track.

She considers the twin practices of privacy and expression in narrative as dueling "religions," an apt metaphor for the partisan passions they arouse and the devotional discipline required to practice them. This deeply thoughtful,vibrant, and generative collection of essays might be considered a meditation on narrative as a practice. One, Hampl tells us, that is not without costs, but whose benefits are worthwhile in giving voice to what are inherently the most private contents of our selves - love, spiritual creed, or suffering.

A story that burdens, enriches, lightens (Books - Memory by Philippe Grimbert)

Philippe Grimbert's Memory is a potent autobiographical novella about a troubled young boy, plagued by the sense that he had a brother.

Although an only child, for many years I had a brother. Holiday friends and casual acquaintances had no option but to take my word for it. I had a brother. Stronger and better looking. An older brother, invisible and glorious.

I always felt envious when I went to stay with a friend and a similar-looking boy walked in. The same disheveled hair and lopsided grin would be introduced with two words: "My brother." An enigma, this intruder with whom everything must be shared, even love. A real brother. Someone in whose face you discovered like features: a persistently straying lock of hair, a pointy tooth... A roommate of whom you knew the most intimate things: moods, tastes, weaknesses, smell. Exotic for me who reigned alone over the empire of my family's four-room flat.

A friend finally shares with him the missing piece, the secret that has haunted his parents, and that shaped him with a permanent sense of loss. Nazi-occupied Paris is the setting of this spare novel, and France's betrayal of its Jewish populace, is among the subjects. It is related in emphatic prose. Sentences that feel less written than stamped on the page, the language driven by anger, by loss, but and also by gratefulness. This story does double-duty. It is not only enriches by adding something to one narrative, its telling lightens the load for another. It is not surprising to discover that Grimbert is a psychoanalyst whose currency is personal narrative, as it is used to define, to know, and to unburden. It's a striking work, well worth the reading.

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?