Italics are mine

Tony Judt’s “Reappraisals” (book review)

 I picked up Tony Judt’s Reappraisals almost at random on a bookstore’s shelves because I needed a paperback to read, and I’ve got to say this is one of the finest essay collections I’ve read in a long, long time. Because Judt – the acclaimed author of Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945 (a New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2005, winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, and Pulitzer Prize finalist), as well as twelve other books – died in 2010, the book, first published in 2008, also reads as the parting gift of an exceptional writer to his audience and our last glimpse into a first-rate mind fascinated by questions of Europe versus America and the engaged intellectual.

Judt himself explains, in the book’s introduction, that his essays have two dominant themes: (1) “the role of ideas and the responsibility of intellectuals” and (2) “the place of recent history in the age of forgetting.” They have been divided into four parts: The Heart of Darkness; The Politics of Intellectual Engagement; Lost in Transition: Places and Memories; and finally The American (Half-) Century. The book ends with an essay revisiting “the new ‘social question’ of poverty, underemployment and social exclusion.” I’ve read all of Parts One and Four and a lot of Part Two so far, so I can’t quite judge the book as a whole, but I know enough to strongly recommend Reappraisals, if you’re looking for an essay collection on current affairs with a European, post-WWII theme.

Throughout the chapters I’ve read, I’ve consistently been impressed by Judt’s ability to write as if he was sitting across the table from his readers and sharing well-argumented thoughts in an assured voice, without pontificating, lecturing or speechifying. One could easily read the essays aloud, and yet the language is not casual – he simply comes across as a very gifted orator who must have mesmerized his students with his lectures at New York University, where he was University Professor and Director of the Remarque Institute, “which is dedicated to the study of Europe and which he founded in 1995” (from the biographical note).

I’ve enjoyed all the essays so far and learned a lot, but I’ll only single out two for particular praise:

• Albert Camus: “The best man in France”, published when Camus’s novel The First Man was published in France in 1994, thirty-four years after the Nobel Prize winner’s death into a car accident – that essay made me buy The First Man during my subsequent trip to the bookstore (I bought the book in French when it was first published but never got a chance to read it for various reasons, and now I read most of my books in English),

• Hannah Arendt and Evil, which appeared in the New York Review of Books in 1995 following the publication of a new collection of Arendt’s essays and her correspondence with Mary McCarthy, and which further motivated me to watch the movie about the philosopher, after one failed attempt during a soggy afternoon that saw the movie theater sell out before I could buy a ticket. (The following attempt was a success and I found the movie outstanding.)

I plan to write soon posts both on Camus’s book and the movie about Arendt, so I won’t go into the details here, but I always love when a book entices me to discover other things (books or movies, in this case) and pushes me in new directions. Judt writes beautifully, convincingly, and displays a staggering breadth and depth of culture without looking down on his readers. Instead, he talks to us as if he expects all of us to be (almost) his intellectual equals and so doesn’t need to water down his arguments, can make his point and trust us to seriously consider what he says, whether we agree with him or not. It is refreshing to read someone who aims high in his writing, with such a strong mastery of the English language and exceptional argumentative skills. I only wish Judt could have written many more books.

Here is a video (uploaded by mediagrrl9 on YouTube) announcing Judt's death of Lou Gehrig disease and describing the main themes of his work.

But what I want to end up on is a short audio excerpt (uploaded by audiobookmturk26a on YouTube) of Judt's Postwar book, which will undoubtedly be an important part of his legacy.

Who was Jacques Rouché?

In my novella, "Isolde 1939", the general manager of the Paris Opera performs - throughout the Occupation - a difficult balancing act when he sticks by his musicians (keeping the Jewish ones on the payroll despite Nazi orders) but also attends social events with the Occupants - if he really has to. My main protagonist, who is much more willing to socialize with the Nazis than he is, helps him stay in the good graces of the Germans. I didn't go into the general manager's story with any depth - I was writing a novella, after all, and the rules of the genre require a tightly-packed story - but for today's post I thought I'd point out that the man truly existed. 

His name was Jacques Rouché (1862-1957), and he was an outsider to the world of opera - an outsider with money, which allowed him to pump substantial amounts of his fortune into the Opéra Garnier. While largely forgotten now, a 2007 exhibition in Paris helped raise awareness of his work and contributions to French performing arts.

The following consists of highlights of his Wikipedia page. He graduated from the prestigious officer/engineering school Polytechnique in 1882 and later got a degree from the just as prestigious Sciences Po, after which he worked in the "Inspection des Finances", a highly sought-after government office. He kept working for the government before heading the Universal Exposition in 1889 to great acclaim, for which he received the French Legion d'honneur at age 27.

His true passion, however, lay in theater and stage direction far more than governmental bureaucracy. He married a perfume heiress in 1893 and then managed and modernized her family's business, through which he built the considerable fortune he would later spend (part of) on the Paris Opera. He led a law-related publication from 1907 to 1939 (at which time the journal ceased publication), and practices directing for three seasons at the Théâtre des Arts, where he already implements some of his novel ideas about programming and scenography.

In 1913, he was named at the helm of the Paris Opera, which did not please everyone. He would remain in those functions for over thirty years. (He is said to have spent 22 million francs-or of his personal wealth during his tenure on the opera. It is hard to make a conversion in euros, but what is sure is that we're talking about dozens of million of euros.)

During the Occupation, Rouché made a point of producing French operas such as La Damnation de Faust by Hector Berlioz and Thaïs by Jules Massenet. He kept Jewish musicians in the payroll until December 1942 although he was forced to part with them in the fall of 1940. He also continued to negotiate with unions after they'd been dissolved and kept employing a Hungarian set designer until December 1943. Nevertheless, he was put on civil trial at the Liberation and terminated in January 1945. (Again, much of this information is drawn from his French Wikipedia page, while the great lines of his career are also provided in the Spotts book.)

Interestingly, while I portray his wife in my novella as someone who share his distaste for the Occupants, at least one book I've read suggested that much of his troubles at the Liberation were due to her own tendency to associate with the Germans, and that although his own behavior had been exemplary, the authorities just couldn't keep him in place given the way his wife had behaved. But you never know how much of it is true, since Rouché had made some enemies due to his fortune - and his exemplary conduct. This was an inspiring man who deserves to be widely remembered.

Performing arts

If you've ended up on my blog because you enjoy performing arts, you might enjoy reading the reviews I wrote about recent events I attended - they're collected under "Performing arts". (I mostly write about East Coast events in Washington DC, New York City or Philadelphia, although I occasionally find myself in Paris, Santa Fe and other random places. What can I say, I am a wanderer.) I'd love to know what you think. I have to write more about the art exhibitions I go to, but you can find a recent review of MoMA's Inventing abstraction here. Care to suggest something I should see if I'm around? Feel free to leave me a comment.

Review of play “Three Sisters”

Chekhov, naturally.

 A play named “Three Sisters” will be judged on the strength of the acting by its three leading actresses, and thankfully each of them was superb – Florence Viala as Olga, Elsa Lepoivre as Macha (in the role initially played by Chekhov’s great love Olga Knipper), and Georgia Scalliet as the youngest, Irina – with another great performance by Coraly Zahonero, who plays the sister-in-law, Natalia.

I had already seen Viala and Zahonero years ago when I still lived in Paris, and I expected great things anyway from Lepoivre who is also playing the title role of Phèdre Salle Richelieu this spring, so there was only Scalliet left to surprise me for the better – she really conveys the hopes and aspirations of her character, whose dream of moving to Moscow meets a slow, painful death. (This was obviously a poor choice of play for me, given my continued struggle to escape the intellectual wasteland of a small town in rural Pennsylvania where I’ve ended up, but I still found the production excellent.) Nitpicking: Lepoivre, who seemed close in age to Viala in real life, was made to look by far the oldest with a stern black dress and a tight bun, although she was supposed to be between the Viala and Scalliet characters in age. That choice didn’t make a lot of sense to me, even if she’s the only one of the sisters who’s married.

Michel Vuillermoz was outstanding as well, with the one caveat that his very strong resemblance with anyone’s mental picture of Cyrano of Bergerac distracted a bit from the plot – and then I realized I had, indeed, seen him as Cyrano in the DVD of the 2007 Molière-award-winning (similar to Tony-award-winning in France) production at the Comédie-Française, and my goodness, he really does look the part – and will reprise it in the production re-run in July.

The production set was very visually appealing, with clean lines and without clutter – not as modern as I like, but I do like modern more than most, and Alain Françon made excellent use of the stage in directing the actors. (How I wish I hadn’t missed his 1998 production of The Cherry Orchard, right when I was in Paris! I’m told it would’ve been a great fit for my tastes.) It was a very solid performance, a deeply moving play that perhaps one enjoys more when one gets older and can better relate to the plight of the three sisters, instead of being a hopeful, carefree college student who doesn’t get why they just don’t pack up and leave. A play that will stay with me.

Review of movie “Le Passé”

Over the weekend I saw the French movie “Le Passé”, which is in official competition at the Cannes film festival – I’d been drawn to it because we owe director Asghar Farhadi the wonderful, Oscar-winning Iranian movie “A Separation”, and because I enjoyed lead actress Bérénice Bejo’s performance in "The Artist". Well, this review is going to contain spoilers, so if you are going to stop reading now, let me just say that, while “Le Passé” isn’t a bad movie, it pales in comparison to the vastly superior “A Separation”, and most movie-goers who hope to experience again the magic of that wonderful earlier film are bound to be disappointed. On the other hand, when I write it isn’t a bad movie, I really do mean it, and we are treated to some very fine acting performances, including by actors I’d never heard of before (I admittedly don’t follow the French movie business anymore). So if you’re into indie movies, “Le Passé” is worth watching, but there are a number of other movies you’d do well to watch first.

Here is the official blurb about the movie: “Four years of separation have gone by and Ahmad arrives from Tehran in Paris after Marie asked him to finally complete their divorce proceedings.” I won’t go into a detailed analysis of the movie – let me just make the following comments:

• The character played by Bérénice Bejo, Marie, is quite unsympathetic. She spends most of the movie screaming and sometimes kicking other people and generally being angry. We find out she’s pregnant with the child of her new boyfriend, and even the new boyfriend says he doesn’t recognize her since Ahmad has arrived, so perhaps this is not the regular her, but I’m always wary, in that sort of quiet dramas, of lead characters failing to attract viewers’ sympathy. Her elder daughter runs away for a day, and no one can blame her. It’s a miracle the girl hung in there for so long. (This is in no way Bejo’s fault, who plays the role she was given very convincingly. Update 5/27: Bejo won the prize of interpretation at Cannes for it. Good for her. She did well in the role. I still find her character terribly unsympathetic.)

• As an example, when we find out the elder daughter did something terrible to the wife of Marie’s new boyfriend, Marie’s first reaction when she sees her daughter after she learned the news is something along the lines of “What did I do to you?”. Not only is the wife in the hospital, but she has a five-year-old son. You’d think perhaps it’d be more appropriate to think about the consequences of that terrible act on the little boy. She also tells Ahmad she’s pregnant right before entering divorce court, doesn’t book him a hotel room like he asked but has him stay at home with her new family, and overall doesn’t come across as a particularly nice person, although she might simply be an overworked mother.

• The fact that Ahmad arrives from Tehran plays no role whatsoever in the movie. He could be arriving from any other foreign country. This for me was an issue, since I’d gone to see the movie because I’d enjoyed “A Separation”, and the blurb of the movie presumably tried to draw in spectators like me. You don’t have to stick to the narrative that got you an Oscar, but don’t talk about Tehran if it’s going to have no impact whatsoever in the story.

• Everyone plays very well, but the actors playing Marie’s new love interest Samir (Tahar Rahim) and his five-year-old son Fouad (Elyes Aguis) deserve a special mention. “Samir” takes his role as a father to heart and wants to teach his son rules and values while making his love for the boy plainly obvious. “Fouad” shows great depth and breadth of emotions for such a small boy. The movie drags on at times but every scene with either of them was spot-on.

You have to stay until the very last scene to get a key piece of information that ends the movie on a very powerful note, so don’t think of leaving before the credits! Final rating: three and a half stars out of five.

Below is the movie's preview uploaded by allocine on YouTube. Enjoy!

"Tristan und Isolde" on DVD

 Sometimes people ask me what DVD of "Tristan und Isolde" I recommend, since the opera plays such an important role in my book. It took me a while, in fact, to find a production I wanted to recommend. Although many were very good, it was important for me to get ahold of something that matched my own tastes - if you're going to buy a DVD because of me, I'd rather be thrilled about what I suggest, because even on Amazon.com we're talking about a $45 purchase.

I'm delighted that the 2009 La Scala production - with Wagnerian superstars Waltraud Meier and Ian Storey in the title roles and directed by movie great Patrice Chereau - has turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. Stunning voices that make you gasp, handsomes actors that look the part, and the sleek visual lines of a modern production that doesn't indulge into gratuitous nonsense to feel important, but instead puts the whole staging to the service of the actors. Only caveat: in the third act, the engineer over-indulged in the "fading to black" feature between camera angles. (This doesn't happen in Acts 1 and 2, though.) But if you put up with that very minor inconvenience, you'll get over four hours of pure musical and visual perfection.

No need for any other DVD after that one, and if you care to hear Storey sing Tristan in real life, he'll be in DC in September, opposite the amazing Deborah Voight for the Tristan und Isolde run at the Washington National Opera. Mark your calendars!

Background Reading: "The Shameful Peace"

I first read about Germaine Lubin - who loosely inspired the main character in my short novel "Isolde 1939" - in a book by Frederic Spotts called "The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation". I got the book in hardcover - discovered it in the now-defunct B&N at Lincoln Center, if my memory is correct - and then later bought it again in paperback because I wanted to be able to carry it around to re-read some chapters.

It is a Yale University Press book, which already tells you it's going to be overpriced ($35 for hardcover and $24 for paperback) - or perhaps it is priced exactly right, since people like me, passionate about the topic, pay the price without a second thought. But the book is a bit misplaced on the YUP list, because it reads much more like a general-audience book than a scholarly one (which I mean as a compliment, having slogged through many scholarly books whose authors wasted a great topic, with the related opportunity to connect with many readers, through their turgid prose).   

I had never heard about Lubin before. The issue of the German Occupation remains a very sensitive topic in France, where I am from (I am also from Belgium and Germany, but from France most of all, and I am a French citizen) - see for instance the 2008 scandal surrounding the exhibition "Les Parisiens sous l'Occupation", showing photographs of Parisians during the Occupation in Paris - and the French have preferred to think about that period in their history as little as possible.

I remember thinking right away, when I read the few paragraphs about Lubin, that it'd make a great novel. For me it remains as important as ever to write about such individuals - not the heroes and not the monsters, but people who ended up somewhere in the middle on the white-to-black continuum of ethical (or unethical) behavior, and for whom it is still not clear whether history has been too harsh or too kind - and it may well have been too kind. It is this sort of people, nowadays, who may hesitate between looking away or taking a stand, running in the other direction or speaking up for justice, writing anonymous slander or making a difference in the world. We need to talk about them - the ones who haven't yet moved to the dark side - so that they'll recognize their dilemma when the moment of choice comes and, perhaps, they'll do what some French people didn't 70 years ago: they'll stay on the right path.

"The Woman Upstairs" by Claire Messud

A quick break from blog posts about my book "Isolde 1939" to review the latest novel by Claire Messud, "The Woman Upstairs." The book is narrated by Nora, a 42-year-old schoolteacher in Cambridge, MA whose plans to become an artist fell by the wayside. She never married, doesn't have children and refers to herself as "the woman upstairs", although she doesn't fit the spinster stereotype (that would be another teacher in her school). Nora develops an infatuation for the parents of a boy she teaches: a couple in town for only one year with the husband a visiting scholar at Harvard and the wife an artist, like Nora herself, except that the wife is actually making a career out of it.

The narrator's voice is very strong - one really feels that Nora is speaking to us. Messud's writing style (with very long sentences interspersed with "--" so that the narrator can go on and on) is very well-suited for this choice of point of view, both when 42-year-old Nora expresses her anger after realizing she's been betrayed and also when she recounts the events that happened when she was 37. It is the sort of voice that keeps pulling you into the novel and doesn't let go of you until you reach the last page.

Without giving too much away, I'll say that Nora is ultimately used and discarded by someone she admired, and because she doesn't come across as a very reliable narrator, not only might she have been used from the start by a selfish, self-centered person, but an important moment with another protagonist might turn out to have only been a small gesture - what the two did is never spelled out, and since Nora explains everything else in detail, I suspect nothing happened at all beyond perhaps a short embrace. But that's my interpretation.

I did read the last few pages in the bookstore before buying it, and I felt that knowing the ending did help me enjoy the book, because I knew it was going to end in the manner that most resonated with me.

The story struck a chord in me because I have enough experience in the world of education to see how something like that could happen - how someone might put her dreams on the backburner while she focuses on earning a paycheck, turn down marriage proposals to remain true to herself and then get caught in the empty hecticness of her daily work, while someone else (a parent in the book's case, but you could imagine other scenarios) tries to take advantage of her - probably thinking that she must be a pitiful individual, if she's childless and single well into her late 30s - while she desperately tries to make her dream of art happen. Messud has a fine eye for what slowly pushes someone to the brink. We all know that lives don't always turn out the way teenagers expected them to when they were growing up, but Messud really shows us the state of mind of someone coming to terms with that, and still young enough to do something about it.

Nora is in fact far from pitiful. When I read about her art and about the other woman's, I found that hers came across as far more original and innovative - it reminded me of the movie The Big Picture, where the character played by Romain Duris (a lawyer in crisis who enjoys photography as a hobby) kills the photojournalist neighbor who was sleeping with his wife and takes his identity. Duris ends up being far more talented as a photographer than his neighbor, although success is fleeting precisely because of what he has done. But fear not: Messud's novel is psychological in nature. It recounts Nora's emotional journey and in spite of angry Nora's ominous threats, there is no violence in it whatsoever.

47-year-old Messud, who has ties to France, Canada and the United States, came to national prominence in 2006 with her novel "The Emperor's Children", set in New York City in the months preceding, as well as in the days immediately following, September 11, 2001. While I enjoyed the book, with its richly textured descriptions and its translation into English of long-winded French sentences that reminded me of home (I'm French), Messud received a lot of flak for her writing style and, most importantly, her use of September 11 as a key plot device in a book focusing on rather shallow people.  

Much has been made of that fact that Messud was quite obscure before the publication of "The Emperor's Children", having published with small press books such as a group of novellas - the ultimate sign of a writer indifferent to commercial success, if there ever was one. When I read the description of "The Woman Upstairs" on Amazon.com, I had serious misgivings about buying the book. In particular, an early description of the novel, which has now been edited, mentioned that the young boy that enters the life of the narrator is attacked in the schoolyard by bullies who call him a "terrorist". And I remember reading that word and shaking my head. I knew Messud most likely hadn't taken part in writing the description, but she already aroused very strong negative feelings for her use of September 11, was it really necessary for her to invoke the t-word? Thankfully, this description has now been edited, and the new one gives a better idea of what the book is about.

I do feel that plot summaries don't do the book justice. Messud masterfully shows us the emotional world of Nora and attempting to summarize it by glib sentences such as "she falls in love with all three of them, the father, the mother and the child" (variants of which I have read) are enormously reductive. The novel works. It simply does.

The review in the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani was on the cold side of lukewarm, with words such as "incongruous mashup of a very self-consciously literary novel (invoking the likes of Chekhov) and one of those psychological horror films... in which someone, ominously, is not who she appears to be." Frankly, with all respect to Kakutani, referring here to a psychological horror film is pure nonsense. Nora's fascination for the family, especially the mother-artist, is very PG-13. I'm disappointed that the famous NYT critic didn't identify Nora's (successful for a time) attempts to reconnect with her passion as an artist as her main drive, and as her redeeming feature that saves her from turning into a cardboard character from those horror films Kakutani refers to. (No stalking, no breaking-into-home, no authorized reading of emails... She looks at the woman's art in her part of the studio they share and wishes, in an admiring way, that she had her family. When she realizes she's been used she cuts the family out of her life. That's the horror? Please.) It's a pity Kakutani didn't realize that the story isn't as far-fetched, and as much a transparent commercial ploy, as what she seems to believe. A great book.

Germaine Lubin and her voice

The French soprano whose life inspired my short novel "Isolde 1939", about an opera singer who sang for the Nazis, was named Germaine Lubin (1890-1979) and before her career became irremediably tainted by her actions during the war and the German Occupation of France, she was best known for her spellbinding voice.

So, before I go into the details of her life, I wanted to share the following YouTube video, in which Germaine Lubin sings Isolde's role in Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde at the Bayreuth Festival in 1939. It so happens that Adolf Hitler, a longtime friend of Wagner's daughter-in-law Winifried, attended the festival every year, and he had already seen Lubin sing at Bayreuth the year before, that time as Kundry in Parsifal. But Isolde is undoubtedly the role she's most remembered for.

This video was uploaded on YouTube by dantitustimshu and in it Lubin sings the Liebestod - the final, dramatic aria of the opera after Tristan has died.

"Isolde 1939"

I plan to write most of my posts this month on my short novel "Isolde 1939", about a French opera singer who sang for the Nazis. The story is loosely inspired by actual events, which I will discuss in more details in the coming days. The posts will all be tagged "Isolde 1939".

While World War II continues to receive an enormous amount of interest in the literature, there has been nothing, to the best of my knowledge, combining opera and World War II. It is, of course, always timely to ask why some people take the high road in spite of the risk of torture and death and others let themselves be drawn into the orbit of madmen, but even more timely now, since we celebrate this year - and this month - the bicentenary of Richard Wagner's birth. (Wagner was not only the favorite composer of Adolf Hitler himself, but the favorite composer of the real-life French soprano who inspired my book.) My story, however, is absolutely not a biography or a historical document, but a work of fiction.

I look forward to sharing these "behind-the-scene" (in more ways than one!) stories with you.