Italics are mine

Five stars for "Counterpoint: A memoir of Bach and mourning" by Philip Kennicott

This turned out to be phenomenally good. I felt compelled to write a review not only because I loved it, but because I suspect the title may give the erroneous impression that the book is only for music lovers. I strongly believe it will resonate with a lot more readers than those who care about Bach. I, for starters, root for Beethoven. And Brahms, and Dvorak, and Shostakovich. Bach is not a composer I feel the need to listen to on a regular basis. (You can judge, I'll get over it.) So, you may ask, which audiences will the book resonate with? The many people out there who have had a complicated relationship with their unhappy, complex mother nursing stifled hopes and increasing resentment for her child while they were growing up. See, I've just expanded the market for Kennicott's memoir about ten thousand fold, or shall we say one hundred thousand? Either is a conservative estimate. This book deserves to be widely read. 

I bought the book because the author is a Pulitzer-Prize winning art and music critic at the Washington Post and I like his reporting. The first chapter was enticing enough, and it helped that I decided to listen to various recordings of the Goldberg Variations while I read. (The two by Glenn Gould, of course - I don't care about Bach but I care about piano, and I care about contemporary geniuses who went off the beaten path, so of course I had Gould's landmark recordings - but also the one by Simone Dinnerstein.) Then I realized the book was about mourning his mother who had brought him to piano lessons, and I started having misgivings because (apparently) happy stories about mothers and their children sharing a common cultural interest in a healthy relationship tend to make me sad that I don't have that with my mother. So I started finding flaws with the book, which was more a reflection of my state of mind. Throughout chapters two, three and four, when young Kennicott starts learning the piano, I insisted that the book was boring, that it should have some snippets of Bach's scores to enliven the page, that this account of Kennicott's learning the piano was a self-indulgence of a music critic whose book would never have found a publisher otherwise, that hopefully when the publisher send Kennicott on book tour they would ask local music students to play a variation or two of the Goldbergs because this way perhaps the audience would make a pity purchase of the book after the event (you can tell I was being triggered by the impression the book was about a happy mother-child relationship around the piano). I kept musing: should I stop now? try to read the first page of each subsequent chapter to save time while pretending I had read it in its entirety? should I give it two or three stars on Goodreads.com? Maybe three stars saying it really deserved two, with one extra star for the author being the WaPo music critic.

And then came Chapter Five. And ladies and gentlemen, this turned into a six-stars-out-of-five book in a snap. After its slow start (or perhaps I missed the clues, sorry if I did) the book transformed into a gem. You see, the relationship between mother and child was, instead of happy, very complicated. I don't want to spoil the enjoyment of reading the book but there was a shocking incident at the beginning of Chapter Five between mother and son that for me showed Kennicott's mother as, in fact, showing a probably case of borderline personality disorder. (I know it is less than advisable to play the armchair psychiatrist and diagnose someone when Kennicott never does, but I am trying to give a sense of what turned the book for me without ruining the surprise for the reader.) And suddenly his mother resembled mine so much more, and at long last I felt someone had written a book about mothers that pays homage to complex mothers with their flaws and their fears and their resentments at their life not turning the way they wanted and how it got reflected on their behavior toward their family, without judging them, without blaming them, without making this a caricature, but instead with empathy and honesty and fairness. In today's society mothers are glorified and occasionally someone famous will admit having had a difficult mother - helicopter mothers are becoming a little cliche these days - but I've never read such a spot-on portrait of my own relationship in someone else's book and I am just so happy that someone could pull it off without coming across as settling scores or nursing a grudge. Instead, Kennicott honors the relationship without embellishing it and his account rings true. It comes as no surprise that he was only able to write this book several years after his mother's passing. 

After that point I just couldn't put the book down and adored every single page of it. Suddenly, the insights on Bach seemed judicious and pertinent and illuminated my understanding of the Goldberg Variations - I honestly can't even say what Kennicott wrote about Bach in Chapters Two through Four because I was so determined to find the book boring, I will have to read those chapters again. Chapter Eight hit a home run as well because it describes Kennicott's friendship with his piano teacher Joseph Fennimore, whose piano lineage reaches back to Ludwig van Beethoven himself. Then in Chapter Nine, Nathan the Dog makes his entrance, and you have to read that chapter and hear how that dog reacts to Bach and - at the end of the chapter - the probable explanation as to why. 

I have underlined many passages in my copy of the book, most of which only have meaning for me, but here are a few quotes I will leave you with. (Summary: Kennicott can write.) 

P.232 of hardcover edition: "We are a curious species. We spend much of our lives doing one thing in order to do another, having children to fix marriages, running marathons to heal psychic traumas, learning music to lessen grief... We muddle through life in order to get somewhere, we suffer in order to be happy, we live in order to have had a life."

P.237: "Had she been merely cruel and capricious, I might have hated her. But all along I saw also the woundedness of her life... When I sat on her deathbed, it wasn't just the fear of my own mortality that pierced me. It was the helplessness of watching an unhappy life come to an unhappy end."

Buy. This. Book. 

This book is a masterpiece: "Actress" by Anne Enright

 It took me a while to get into this book, which I bought at the last Arts & Letters Live event at the Dallas Museum of Art before the coronavirus panic cancelled everything. The event was on a Tuesday. Two days earlier, Louise Erdrich had spent most of her time at the Arts & Letters Live event reading from her book (we are talking about forty-five minutes here, reader), and so many attendees had complained that a kind soul at the DMA had told Anne Enright: "don't just read from your book, talk about art and creativity." Which isn't necessarily what we wanted - we wanted to hear about process, about the magic behind the scenes, but was still better than sitting through forty-five minutes of someone reading her book at us. Anne Enright did seem to try as hard as she could to talk about art and creativity, but she was also clear that this topic puzzled her a little, because for her writing was work, and what you had to do, mostly, was show up and pull the words out of you. (I paraphrase.) Yet she tried her hardest to give us what we had come for. I liked her so much I even looked more interviews of her on the Internet and came across this one.

It was a good talk, and Enright's Irish accent left no doubt she was not from the States, even before she mentioned Dublin. I bring it up because the novel doesn't follow the American tropes of what makes a good novel, and some American readers will be left annoyed, although they shouldn't. The focus in the U.S. is so much on plot that a novel like Actress is bound to bother some. The voice is spellbinding - the narrator's voice in the first-person point of view grabs you and never lets go - but the plot remains threadbare for a while. We're supposed to turn the page because the narrator's mother - the actress in the title - shot someone in  the foot. That doesn't seem important enough to keep the reader entranced, and it really isn't. But the novel really isn't about that. It is about the relationship of the actress mother and the narrator daughter, interspersed with comments on the narrator's marriage to her husband, addressed as 'you' in the text, which jolted me and I want to say jarred me but it was just perfect for this book and this narrator.

Enright's powers of observation are amazing in this book. I never knew what it was like to be in a character's head until I read Actress, and I expect my writing to benefit greatly as a result. I loved what the narrator paid attention to, and how she phrased things - although she didn't have any particularly novel turns of phrase, she came across as very real in how she interpreted some of the things that her mother did and some other things that happened to her mother. Of the narrator's tastes we know very little, so it is hard to say whether I like her or not. The most we learn about her is through her love affairs, in particular the one with the man who will become her husband. And Enright is so spot on about that part that I just wouldn't put the book down until I had finished it after I reached that point.

I teared up toward the end. I'm 42 and I'm not afraid to admit it (both the crying and my age). Those were the pages about the daughter-mother relationship after (I'm trying not to spoil the novel here) an older man the mother knows has sex with the daughter  in a not completely consensual manner. (Read the novel.) And that's the point in the novel, of all places, where her mother felt more alive on the page than mine in real life, but hers was a talented actress who had a body in addition to a brain and mine was a spoilt child who was crass and vulgar and talentless and not particularly intelligent and terribly resentful of any women who professed to enjoy sex. And I thought about my ideal mother in the world of realistic mothers (ideal but realistically enough) and I thought about a world where members of families get to exist on their own terms, as their own person, and not because the parents want to make themselves feel good at the expense of the children and I thought about more things and mostly I thought about why I had wanted to escape to France so badly and why once I had made it to the United States I had not wanted to come back.

The relationship between mother and daughter in Enright's novel is rich with nuances and vivid with colors and the only criticism I would utter, just to show I can still have a critical mind in front of this masterpiece, is that the daughter doesn't seem to change much throughout the book, although she does grow up (because the novel mostly shows up in her teens and her young adulthood). While I was reading I kept thinking: American writers would not write a novel like that, it has no plot, and there is doubt that Enright as Irish woman was able to get away with more than an American lady in her position. (I also loved all of her observations about the world around her. This seems a time as good as any to mention it.) So, to my American readers: stick with it. This is a book that stays with it and rises high above the fray when so many American novels attempt to follow a foolproof recipe for success. It is the sort of book you write when you are confident enough in your craft that you are not worried about the author's reaction.

Other Irish writers have experimented with strong voices of first-person narrators recently - I am thinking in particular of Milkman by Anna Burns, Burns being North Irish as well as the recent recipient of the Booker Prize for this book. It is also written in first-person point-of-view with little to no dialogue and just a lot of interior narration. A greater sense of danger pervades Milkman, and to be frank I paused reading it yet but will get back to it soon. But it is interesting - although not surprising - that European novelists take more risks with their fiction. In the United States the publishing model means that authors try to hit the blockbuster formula - a book no one will object to, no one will feel transformed by, just a solid yet predictable story where the hero goes through a lot of hardships (especially some that lend themselves well to special effects) and wins in the end, whether it is the girl, the prize, both, or more. I don't read novels as much as I should, finding American novels quite disappointing most of the time, but Enright's is worth keeping.

I'll finish by mentioning that Enright reads her own novel in the audiobook, and if the few pages she read at the Dallas Museum of Art are any indication, you will really get the most of the reading experience if you buy the audiobook and listen to Enright create this world anew for you.

One of the best books of 2020, no doubt.         

Review of "Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty"

I bought this over a year ago and never got around to watching it until last weekend. I wasn't very familiar with Barber's work (or his life, for that matter) and always found other DVDs to watch instead of this one, from opera productions and documentaries about other artists to multiple versions of the Anna Karenina mini-seriesand blockbuster movies I didn't catch when they were playing in theaters. Now I wish I had paid attention to Barber earlier.

I remember enjoying the opera documentary The Opera House about the reopening of Lincoln Center in 1965 with a brand new opera Antony and Cleopatra conducted by Thomas Schippers. Schippers once was a rising star at the Metropolitan Opera and ended his career at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra before his untimely death of lung cancer at age 47 (his life was also rather unhappy because he had to hide his homosexuality, you can read the blog post I wrote about Schippers here).

In fact I wrote this blog post around the same time I purchased Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty so I must have been interested in learning more about Antony and Cleopatra's author, but when I started watching Absolute Beauty a few days ago I had completely forgotten he had authored what is now considered as an epic dud, although the documentary makes a good case the responsibility for the highly-publicized failure falls squarely on the shoulder of director Franco Zeffirelli, who doomed the production with his grandiose staging(Leontyne Pryce got stuck in a pyramid on opening night but kept singing) rather than due to a flaw of the opera itself. The documentary also argues that the opera got bad press because the media was out to get Barber after many years of unmitigated success, and he never wrote anything substantial after that.

Samuel Barber had a long-term relationship with Gian-Carlo Menotti, who also has a long-term relationship with Schippers. This might have been why the Menotti name sounded familiar, as I haven't seen any of the operas he composed. Barber and Menotti ultimately separated (Menotti was drawn to younger men, including Schippers), which forced Barber to sell the beloved home they had shared in the country and return to New York City, which made him ill at ease. In the end Menotti is only a footnote to history and Schippers hasn't fared that much better (although the recording I have of his conducting documents his talent) but Barber's music continues to awe audiences. Just the other day I witnessed a magnificent performance of his piano concerto by none other than Garrick Ohlsson, whose interpretation of Brahms I adore.

Of course, me being me, I had to compensate my long neglect of Barber by sudden, extensive interest in his life and work. It helped that the documentary was fascinating, with plenty of documents of the time such as photographs and insightful interviews of music experts ranging from Leonard Slatkin to Barber biographer Barbara Heyman. Perhaps it was fortunate that I didn't watch the Barber documentary back in November 2018 when I first purchased, as I would probably have purchased the first edition of Barber's bio at the time, but a second edition was published just last month, building upon new archival documents. Just to finish talking about the documentary, the first half is mostly spent talking about his music (starting with the song cycle Dover Beach but also commenting on  his best-known work Adagio for Strings), showing musicians rehearsing his music, recording them discuss his music. It was very insightful. At the halfway point, the focus shifts and starts including more details on Barber's personal life. I found it fascinating how every music critic pilloried him when Antony and Cleopatra failed in spectacular fashion, as if they had all wanted to cut him down to size. I also enjoyed the insight of his biographer Barbara Heyman, based on a note of his that she found, that he was as modernist as he could get away with it, without sacrificing tonality and basically audience appeal (which does not mean his work is easy listening fare, because it definitely is not, but it is nice not to have to listen to Schoenberg-like atonal works.) I also liked her comment that he only wrote one of everything (one violin concerto, one piano concerto, etc) because he felt he had said exactly all that he wanted to say using that instrument in his first try. Heyman came across as extremely knowledgeable about Barber.    

So I bought 4 CDs of Barber and his bio. (I wasn't kidding when I was writing about my sudden extensive interest...) The bio arrived a few days ago, it is a superb book of high quality with reproductions of part of Barber's scores. I can't wait to delve into it. The Barber recording by the London Symphony Orchestra is also excellent, the violin concerto in particular took my breath away. As for the other recordings, they just arrived and so I haven't had a chance to decide what I think about them yet, but I love having multiple recordings of the same piece to listen to the nuances brought in by each conductor and compare them. Thirty-nine years after his death, Barber remains a giant of American music and the documentary Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty is a valuable companion to anyone interested in learning more about his talent. 

 

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On Likable Characters

 Someone, reading the beginning of my opera novel the other day, made the familiar comment that the two main characters weren't likable enough. For those of you who haven't followed me for long, it is a novel about two French opera singers during World War II. I have written several drafts of it since I first got the idea for it in 2009 (!) reading the nonfiction book The Shameful Peace by Frederic Spotts on the bus back from New York City. In it, Spotts describes how French soprano superstar Germaine Lubin associated with the Nazis during the war. I find her fascinating, because she was already famous when the war came and could have used her renown to take a stand. Instead, perhaps because she was best known for her interpretations of Wagnerian roles like Brunnhilde and Isolde, which had made her a darling of the crowd at the Bayreuth Festival (attended by Hitler himself), she chose to have a grand time with Third Reich officers. A picture of her at the 1939 Bayreuth Festival shows her, all smiles, sitting at Hitler's feet. She is also rumored to have had an affair with a Nazi. Hence, Germaine Lubin, while fascinating in real life, makes for an underwhelming character in a novel, as she undergoes no character development whatsoever and after the war denied all responsibility in her actions, tried to return to the stage (was thwarted) and helped a sympathetic writer pen an admiring biography of her to absolve herself of any wrongdoing. So Germaine was not suitable as a novel character at all.

Instead I chose to focus on the ambition of a young woman whose career has been thwarted by the lead soprano at the Paris Opera and who finds that singing for the Nazis is her last chance at success. I hope some readers will relate to her, but I don't particularly want her to be likable. For me "likable character" is code for American consumerism, for wanting a work that, by appealing to many, never becomes memorable or thought-provoking - easy to digest fare that can't be argued with, protagonists who are good people with only minor flaws, antagonists who are two-dimensional villains, like those in blockbuster movies with a mindless plot that hits all the right notes at predictable intervals. (I also think the issue of likability is raised far more often with female characters than with male, which I take issue with, and I prefer female characters who don't care one bit about being likable.)

If my book resonates with many, of course I will be thrilled, but I care more about finding the specific audience that is the best fit for it. If you had dreamed of success since you were little, had a specific talent for which you had been abundantly praised, but now had a hard time seeing success materialize before your talent wilted in front of your eyes, to what length would you go to fulfill your potential? I want my book to reach those people who feel my main protagonist could have been themselves, people who understand thwarted ambition and the temptations it brings, people who relate to (although do not necessarily condone) the sacrifice talented folks sometimes have to make in the pursuit of their art. We'll see if I can find them.