Italics are mine

Julie Orringer on "Lies that tell the truth"

Radcliffe fellow Julie Orringer, author of The Invisible Bridge (Knopf, 2010) and a forthcoming novel on Varian Fry, delivered the Julia S. Phelps lecture in December at Harvard. Her topic was "Lies that tell the truth". In the talk she attempts to explain why she felt compelled to write a novel on Fry rather than a nonfiction book, but also takes a broader perspective by including her previous book - a historical novel based on the true story of a relative - her short story collection and other authors' books such as Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (set in Eugenides's hometown) and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (imagining what would have happened if Lindbergh had won the 1940 presidential election). The most compelling parts of her talk are those where she focuses on her own historical fiction, but the video is an enjoyable watch throughout.

In a later post I'll write about why I chose to write Isolde 1939 as a novel rather than a biography of the person who inspired my main character, and hopefully offer a complementary perspective to Orringer's. I'm looking forward to reading her book when it is out. I have read Villa Bel Air, about Varian Fry's activities during the war as he attempted to save Jewish refugees from the Nazis in Marseilles, and I am currently reading the biography of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman, Hirschman who (as it turns out) played an important role in Fry's operations under the nickname Beamish before he became a remarkable economist. There is no doubt Fry's time in Southern France, and the cast of characters involved in the rescue operation, can make a fantastic novel. Here is to hoping the book comes out soon!   

Virtual Art Gallery

(Edited July 7 to clarify the order in which I name the paintings. Picture credits: Southwest Art. Please take a look at the latest issue of the magazine and/or support the artists.) Here are some paintings I saw in last August's issue of Southwest Art and really liked. (I wanted to write this blog post a while back but never got around to it... things got hectic with the semester in session. This is also part of a series of posts I am writing while I am doing research on my new project - more info on that soon.) You know I love them because of the colors! And the connection to the southwest is an added plus. Really wish I had been able to return to Santa Fe last summer. Let me know which painting you like most.

The paintings are, in order (top row left to right and then bottom row left to right, please refer to the magazine for larger pics):

• New Moon by Birger Sandzen.
• Bosque Rhythms by Connie Dillman.
• Evening Serenade by Bryan Mark Taylor.
• Study of the Rock River Valley by Mark Gould.
• Catalina Mountains by David Jonason.
• Birds of a Feather by September Vhay.
• Evening Glow by Terri Sanchez.
• Sage & Symbol by Louise Minks. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More on Germaine Lubin

A book that was quite useful when I researched Germaine Lubin, the French soprano who sang for the Nazis during the Occupation and inspired the character of Yvonne Chevallier in my book Isolde 1939, is her biography (veering toward the hagiography, in my opinion), in French and currently out of print but available at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (Cullman Center at Lincoln Center). You can see the book's cover to the left. (Digression: I need to point out how tremendously useful the NYPL library has been to my research. Even in this day and age, there is something to be said about living close to New York City when it comes to researching music icons, and that is true of my current project too. That library is a gem.)

The author is clearly taking sides with Lubin regarding the controversial parts of Lubin's past, and the book's value isn't in the insights she sheds on Lubin's personality - except perhaps unwittingly, because I suspect Lubin was very good at charming people, both during the Occupation and, it seems, decades later when talking to strangers who could help her become rehabilitated in public opinion. That motivated the scene in the cemetery at the end of my book, although the stranger who approaches Yvonne Chevallier in front of her son's grave is the pure product of my imagination.

The biography helped me understand the protagonists in Germaine's life a bit better and, most importantly, it had a stunning picture of Germaine Lubin sitting at the feet of Adolf Hitler at the Bayreuth festival. I can't bring myself to show the picture here, but you can find it easily with a Google search. In my book, the picture ends up playing an important role in Yvonne's life, especially during her trial. The picture stuns me every time I look at it, so of course it had to be part of my story.   

If you'd like to know more about Germaine Lubin to better distinguish the facts of her life from the fiction of my novella, you might want to read her biographical notes on Wikipedia and Cantabile Subito. She truly was a complicated woman with enormous talent and a complex personality.

Katharine Hepburn

Here is another post about a woman I admire, after last week's on Berberova: Katharine Hepburn, who needs no introduction. (Writing about role models keeps me grounded in the most hectic times. Bear with me. It's for a good cause.) She made history through her talent as an actress, her refusal to abide by convention, her many contradictions (tomboy from a blue-blood family who graduated from Bryn Mawr before making a career in the movies with an atypical physique), as well as her long love affair with Spencer Tracy while he was married to someone else.

I remember watching her movies in English class in high school, and not caring one bit about Bringing Up Baby. I came around when I saw her later movies, especially Lion in Winter and On Golden Pond. Next on my list is to watch her play the opium-addicted mother in the 1962 staging (now in DVD) of Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey Into Night. I only wish she had written a better memoir than Me: Stories of my life, or that someone had published a good biography about her. There are many books about her but none that seems definitive, and the best account of her life is, hands down, her obituary in the July 14 2003 issue of The New Yorker: "Born for the part". (Highly recommended.)

Here is the trailer for Lion in Winter (1968). 

 

Nina Berberova

While I am busy doing research on my next fiction project, I thought I'd write a blog post on the person who has inspired my writing and whose autobiography (Italics are mine) gives my blog its name: Nina Berberova. I wrote about her before, but it is good to remember teachers and role models again. Berberova was born in Saint Petersburg in July 1901 and died in September 1993 in Philadelphia, of all places.

Her life was marked by exile from the then-Soviet Union - she left Russia in 1922 with her companion, Vladislav Khodassevitch and spent 25 years in Paris - and immigration to the United States in 1950 with teaching posts at Princeton and Yale. (I am tempted to say: how lucky those students were, but in all likelihood they had no clue she would one day become famous, since her books hadn't been translated yet.)

She was completely unknown until the "éditeur" (owner) of the French publishing house Actes Sud discovered her and published all her works in French translation starting in 1985. And yes that makes her eighty-four by the time she finally got the success she deserved. The role of a French publishing house certainly explains in large part why Berberova is rather well-known in France (she continues being the focus of broadcasts and studies years after her death) while she doesn't quite seem to have drawn as much attention in the States.  

Actes Sud has carved out a niche for itself by publishing almost solely short novels, and being located far from the center of the French publishing world (Paris) in the small southern city of Arles. Its perennial outsider status and its interest in meaningful literature make it an outstanding choice to publish Berberova's body of work. If you read French, here is a brochure Actes Sud published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Berberova's birth, back in 2001. And here is her 1993 obituary notice in the New York Times.

Khachaturian violin concerto

Someone named fur bru posted this recording of David Oistrakh playing the Khachaturian violin concerto with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra on YouTube. (Oistrakh premiered the concerto in Moscow in September 1940, but I'm not sure when the recording was made.) This has quickly become one of my all-time favorite music pieces. Unfortunately, this specific recording is not currently available on Amazon, even as a download. I'll make sure to buy it when it is. It absolutely shows why David Oistrakh is considered one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century.

F.C.C.Cadell's "The Orange Blind"

Today's post is on one of my favorite paintings, The Orange Blind (1883-1937), by Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell, one of the four Scottish colourists. I discovered the painting during a weekend sightseeing trip when I was interning at Compaq about fifteen years ago and, given my love of Fauvism, Post-Impressionism and German Expressionism (Blaue Reiter group), it is not hard to see why I like it. If you have any doubt, throw in my love of the Jazz Age too.

Reviewing a 2011 retrospective of his work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, a Financial Times reviewer called him an "underrated modernist master" who was shortchanged by an art dealer's stroke of genius: grouping four artists under the name "Scottish colourists" in 1948, when three of them had already been dead for at least a decade. (A short biography of Cadell is available here.) I haven't found anything by Cadell as powerful as The Orange Blind, but whenever I look at the poster on my wall, I am amazed that he could come up with so remarkable a painting. He doesn't seem to have gained the recognition he deserves outside Scotland, but if you'd like to know more about the Scottish colourists, this book (available from Amazon UK) offers plenty of insights and pictures.

More on the New Book

Happy New Year! May you and your loved ones have a fantastic 2014 full of joy and happiness!

I promised in my last post more information on my new novel, The Breakthrough, so here are a few points I thought worth mentioning. (Spoilers alert.) The first one is that much of the story deliberately hinges on very tiny things: an off-hand comment a student makes to a journalist, a mistake buried at the end of a paper. Back in the days (many years ago) where I showed the book to agents, some commented that they wanted something bigger, giving the book more mainstream potential, but it would also have done the story a disservice: the whole point is that the scientist left his family behind in France to pursue endeavors that he hoped would be transformational in the advancement of knowledge, and turned out to be very, very, very minor.

The second one is that the journalist and the professor are rather similar in where they stand in their careers and, as another character mentions toward the end, they could even have become friends if they had met before the professor's stroke. In fact, the whole book is rather a roman noir with just about every character down on his or her luck and the main protagonists trying to figure out what the professor learned before he had his stroke.

The third one focuses on the last scene about (not with...) the professor's current graduate student, Olivia. I wrote that part with Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Das Versprechen in mind, a famous 1958 German novel where the detective doesn't know the child-killer is dead and keeps waiting to trap him. For me, Olivia is going to try forever to fix the paper and doesn't realize her efforts will be in vain, but I only wanted to hint at that ending so that readers could imagine something else for her when they reached that point. Let me know what you think when you read the scene at the Brattle movie theater. Part of the reason I so loved writing that book is that I could re-live being back in Boston and Cambridge, so of course there was no chance in the world that I wasn't going to have a scene at the Brattle.    

Finally, a key message of the book is that, although the professor was unable to achieve the landmark scientific discovery that would have justified his expatriation (something he became very keen on after his father died, which is why he pressured his doctoral student to finish the paper and why the student left a mistake in a proof after uncovering it - the student first wanted to do his best, and then he wanted to graduate and move on), he ultimately secures his reputation thanks to his Harvard-trained son, who sets up a charitable foundation in his father's name after his father has a debilitating stroke. Money (that the family can't really afford to spend) will buy his father the reputation he was hoping to acquire through scientific discovery by helping underprivileged students instead. So it is also a wink to the role of money in America.

If you like the book, a review on Amazon or Goodreads would be much appreciated.

For 2014, my fiction writing will return to the themes of my first book, Isolde 1939, and focus on music and World War II - but this time it won't be set in Paris. (It'll be another good story inspired from real events... More information toward the summer.)

Best wishes for a fantastic 2014!