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.         

The Paris Review interview of Alice McDermott

A few weeks ago I read an interview of Alice McDermott in the fall 2019 issue of The Paris Review. I have only read one book by McDermott but I still remember it very vividly because it was the first novel I bought when I arrived in the United States. Back in those days the Cambridgeside Galleria had a small bookstore on its first floor, part of a chain I think, and National Book Award winner Charming Billy had just come out in paperback. The Billy of the title, friend, husband and alcoholic, has just died and his family and acquaintances are trying to come to terms with his passing after the funeral. Reading McDermott's interview in the Paris Review brought back memories of those first few weeks of graduate school twenty years ago, the Tang Hall residential hall at M.I.T., ephemeral friendships with students on my floor (although I still stay in touch with the student who lived in the apartment exactly above mine).

McDermott was the Richard A. Macksey Professor for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University until she stepped down in June 2019 at age 66. Funnily enough, she lives in Bethesda, Maryland, a city I spent quite a bit of time in back in 2012 and 2013 without ever knowing she lived there. I wish I had run into her at the local Barnes & Noble, so enjoyable with its large bay windows in the cafe area, or - in D.C. rather than Bethesda - Politics and Prose or Kramerbooks. Oh, the memories of the drive down U.S. 15, the afternoons in D.C. at the Phillips Collection near Dupont Circle or at the Smithsonian, where I loved to work on my laptop in the inner courtyard of the American Art Museum and my wanderings through the National Gallery of Art and my many trips to the Shakespeare Theatre Company, where I saw Henry IV Part 1 twice, in two separate trips from Bethlehem, because I liked the production of that play so much. But, back to McDermott.

What is a bit unusual about McDermott is that she made it in the publishing world - collecting an impressive array of nominations to the most important literary prizes in the country - without fancy diplomas or connections. She didn't have a MFA from a top program. Instead, she received a BA from SUNY-Oswego and a MA from the University of New Hampshire. I loved the part in the Paris Review interview where she mentions she generally works on two novels at the same time - something that has happened to me in the past, when I had to put aside one and start another to clear my mind before going back to the first one. 

Of course I enjoyed all the insights into McDermott's process, her discussions about her choices of narrators, her willingness to start out writing without knowing in advance where the writing is going to take her. She has shaped her writing life like a real job, writing five days a week, about eight hours a day, but because of her two-novel habit, she really works on one novel about twenty hours a week - something that is a bit daunting for me to imagine. I can write two hours every morning before going to work (I like getting up early), but that would still mean finding ten hours every weekend to match McDermott's progress on at least one of her novels. She also talked about the Catholic-writer label that stuck to her "like gum to a shoe". Society likes to label people but can there be something more irritating for a writer, especially one as prolific as McDermott, than being shoved into a neat box? I loved this sentence: "When my brothers and I grew old enough to rebel, my father would warn us not of the fires of hell but of the times ahead when we might need the comfort faith provides."

This was a very thoughtful, informative interview in which McDermott's personality shone through and I truly had the impression of knowing her a bit better after I was done reading. If she reminds me of my time in Cambridge, Jennifer Haigh reminds me of my years in Pennsylvania (because of Baker Towers, set in a coal-mining town of PA, of course) and I hope Haigh gets to be interviewed by The Paris Review too someday. 

Review of "The Great Believers"

I rarely find a novel I cannot put down, but The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai was one of those books. I bought it because it had gotten very positive reviews and I am always trying to learn something from other people's novels. It is a stirring story about AIDS in Chicago in the 1980s and the people that the epidemic impacted and ultimately killed. No other disease in recent times was as much a death sentence as AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s and the fact that it tore through entire communities makes the story even more poignant and heartrending.

I applaud Makkai for her ability to get into her characters' heads - Yale and Fiona, especially Yale - although she comes a little short on period details. The novel is told from a dual point of view: Yale in the 1985 and Fiona in 2015, with chapters alternating from one to the other. The part of the story set in 1985 is more interesting. The bits about 2015 are important to see the far-lasting consequences of the losses Fiona went through in the 1980s and the impact death has for survivors decades later, but the part of the book that really stirs the reader's heart is really the one about Yale. 

I lost a distant acquaintance of mine to AIDS in July 1996 in France and a lot of details rang true, for instance his joining a very large bureaucratic institution he most likely found himself stifled in, which only made sense in hindsight because of his need for health insurance, and his returning to die in his provincial and closed-minded hometown rather than in Paris, because that was what his family wanted. I've sometimes thought over the years about that day he left Paris, knowing he was leaving to die and would not see the city again. When I read Makkai's book I realized it had never occurred to me he might have been blind by the time he left. (One of the AIDS-stricken characters becomes blind in the hospital.) But if he wasn't blind I wonder what he chose to pay attention to for his last day in town, when he was already so close to death. 

Makkai demonstrates a striking ability to make us care for Yale and follow along as he goes from professional elation to personal heartbreak and more. I actually can't tell when I have last cared for a fictional character as much. The various subplots are beautifully tied together. The book is truly a masterpiece.

Interestingly, she has written several more novels before this one that have been well reviewed but have not quite achieved commercial success. The average customer ratings of her previous novels have been lower than this one, in part because The Great Believers has set the bar so high. So it also shows that you have to keep writing the stories you want to tell and trust that one day you will find your public. 

Review of "I will never see the world again"

If I will never see the world again by Ahmet Altan were a novel, it would be heralded as the Darkness at noonof our time, a landmark in the fiction of imprisonment and dictatorship worthy of Arthur Koestler. But it is a memoir instead, all the more devastating by its spare prose and the knowledge that writers like Altan, arrested on charges of sending “subliminal messages” to enemies of the Turkish government when he appeared on television the evening before the 2016 attempted coup against President Recep Erdogan, are oppressed not during the Stalin purges of decades past but in our day and time. Worse, this systematic muzzling of educated and successful professionals is happening in a country with a prestigious past, a country of remarkable accomplishments that governed a large part of the world under the Ottoman Empire and created artworks of stunning beauty such as the Greek Orthodox Christian cathedral turned museum Hagia Sofia, the historic Sultan Ahmed Mosque or Blue Mosque and the former residence of Ottoman sultans Topkapi Palace. This magnificent country has also gifted us the literature of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Sabahattin Ali, Elis Shafak and Orhan Pamuk and made groundbreaking discoveries through leading scientists of our time like Ali Erdemir and Aykut Barka.

While we can hope that Koestler’s tale, so removed in time, does not apply to us, we cannot shrug off Altan’s memoir as easily. We are all involved, even if only through our failure to demand the release of political prisoners caught in Erdogan’s purges following the failed coup. At a time where the leader of the Free World is playing golf, tweeting about himself, reneging on past commitments and allowing Turkey to massacre the Kurds without even attempting to bargain for, say, the upholding of basic human rights in exchange for his imprimatur, the lost opportunity is staggering – to save Altan himself but also the other Turks caught in Erdogan’s net, such as army officers jailed because they all attended the War College the same year and one of their classmates had accused them. They had not been among the plotters, but among the officers who had replaced those arrested. They had joined the military before they had even become men. Their sense of identity had collapsed.

            The book is harrowing in the quiet beauty of Altan’s writing mixed with the callousness of those thrust suddenly in positions of power: the judge deciding on a possible life sentence who coldly cuts short lawyers’ arguments, indifferent to the defendant’s plight, but then gets upset because he has missed the five o’clock shuttle home, or the doctor who refuses that the police officer remove Altan’s handcuffs when he arrives for an X-ray although she knows that the handcuffs, engineered to tighten when the prisoner moves, are leaving deep purple bruises on the wrists of the then-sixty-eight-year old.

The book starts with Altan’s arrest in his apartment at dawn, followed by the arrest of his brother Mehmet, a professor of economics at Istanbul University who lives nearby. (In a twist worthy of slapstick comedy, the police at first believe that Mehmet is not home because they have been knocking on the wrong door. The book brims with such moments that would bring some emotional levity to Altan’s account, if it did not carry damning testimony of the police force’s incompetence.) The chapters are short out of necessity: written as stand-alone vignettes and smuggled one at a time by his lawyers amidst personal papers. This structure adds to the book’s power. The memoir goes on describing Ahmet’s arrival in jail and his fellow prisoners, some who are extremely religious while Ahmet is not. Yet what they experience together in prison supersede their religious beliefs and brings about a new ability to live together. Several encounters with judges and doctors boggle the mind with their Kafkaesque undertones. But moments of kindness between prisoners also tug on the reader’s heartstrings, such as when the daughter of a very religious inmate is arrested and Ahmet, in spite of his indifference of religion, agrees that if his daughter is released, he will pray alongside the inmate and give his devotions to God. And the daughter is released after four months, and Ahmet prays.

Ahmet also documents his resolve, often tested, not to lose his sanity in an environment where the lack of mirrors makes inmates feel they have become invisible and where the lack of a clock makes prisoners lose the sense of time. He caps the book with writing so crystalline the reader is caught between the impulse of buying whatever novel of his has been translated into English and sign petitions to call for his release. The lyrical writing in the last chapter about how he ultimately stood up for his inner freedom even as he was imprisoned will take the reader’s breath away. Altan himself is aware of the danger of using readers’ emotions triggered by injustice and he touches upon it movingly in that very last chapter, although he must have hoped that the international spotlight would help assuage his plight, since the legal proceedings against him remained decidedly farcical. His story possesses an ending beyond the last page, since the Supreme Court overturned Altan’s life sentence in July of this year but refused to drop the charges against him, alleging that he knew in advance of the attempted coup. Altan, who will turn seventy in March of next year, remains in prison.

Yet the overturning of his sentence doesn’t lessen the impact of the book. Hundreds of Turks are rotting with him in jail: members of the upper middle class, educated people, citizens who have much to bring to Turkey’s economic prosperity. The exodus of academics out of Turkey after the coup, because of fears regarding what they call freedom of mind, has even caught Erdogan’s attention. Altan’s fellow prisoners may not be writers but they would still make valuable contributions to a democratic Turkey. Instead, they are caught in a very wide net that makes them culpable by association, culpable by thought, culpable because someone who wanted to save himself denounced them.              

Faced with yet another debacle surrounding the Nobel Prize of Literature, split this year between a genocide denier who has expressed support for Slobodan Milosevic and a woman whose latest book translated into English has been decidedly minor, Altan’s book also begs the question of what purpose literature prizes serve, if they go to either deeply flawed individuals or second-tier artists instead of crowning works of stunning artistry like this book. It is worth mentioning that the genocide at Srebrenica has been well documents by many human rights organizations and news outlets, and Slobodan Milosevic has been found guilty of war crimes at La Hague. The fact that the Nobel Prize was split for the first time in history does suggest a certain ambivalence from some judges, to reward an individual demonstrating such moral turpitude, which they apparently felt could only be resolved by splitting the prize. Not giving it out might have proved a wiser decision, although Altan proves in this memoir that he would have been highly deserving of the prize. But of course giving a literary prize to a political prisoner does not only look backward, at his past body of work, but forward, with the hope that the international spotlight will contribute to his release.  

Am I placing too much hope in the Nobel Prize as a way to pressure oppressive regimes? In 2010 Chinese poet Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize – not the Nobel Prize in Literature – for his support of the Tiananmen protests, where he is widely credited with saving countless lives when he exhorted students to leave the square, as well as his far-ranging activism in favor of democracy. For instance he took part in drafting the Charter 08 manifesto, which demanded freedom of speech, the upholding of human rights and democratic elections in China. Poetry itself can also prove a sharp weapon against autocrats, as Liu demonstrated in June Fourth Elegies, which commemorated the Tiananmen massacre in spite of autocrats’ efforts to scrub the events from memory. Condemned to prison, Liu received the Nobel Prize in absentia and died in 2017, only three weeks after being granted medical parole for liver cancer. Did the Nobel Prize help or worsen Liu’s suffering? Did it motivate the Chinese leadership to flex its muscles instead of perhaps releasing Liu once his name had sunk in obscurity? Liu’s magnificent poems have gained a broader international readership thanks to the publicity surrounding his Nobel Peace Prize, but his books remain banned in China, where they are most needed.

Like Liu, Altan given his age may well only see the world again for a few weeks before his death. He will live on through his books, especially the translated ones that escape the censorship of his native country. But the goal of good literature is not just to save its writer from obscurity. It is to change the readers, so that they will pass the book forward through their actions, and not fleeting remembrance that they once perused a memoir. There is no worthier impact for literature that to incite us, we the lucky ones who live without having to fear a knock on the door at dawn to be hauled off to damp jails and preposterous trials, to pressure the people in position of power to use their influence for the good of their fellow citizens.

 

I will never see the world againby Ahmet Altan, translated from the Turkish by Yasemin Çongar, Other Press, 2019, 212 pages, $15.99.

More NYRB readings

Here are some more articles from the NYRB that I've enjoyed reading. From the May 23 issue: a review of the French movie Non-Fiction directed by Olivier Assayas (because of the connection to Paris in general and the Parisian world of publishing in general) and of the 1978 Spanish novel Valley of the Fallen by Carlos Rojas now translated by Edith Grossman (because of my own interest in the Spanish Civil War, although the book doesn't specifically cover that period and instead focuses on the early nineteenth century where Rojas portrays the relationship between acclaimed painter Francisco de Goya and the despot King Fernando VII, and the final years of Generalissimo Franco’s dictatorship in the 1970s). 

I like many articles in the NYRB but I only save a few of them and another one I saved is a review of the biography of modern artist Sophie Taueber-Arp, 1889-1943 (reviewed by Jed Perl, the author of one of my favorite books, New Art City, about art and culture in New York City around the middle of the century), that one from the March 7 issue. Taeuber-Arp is widely considered as one of the most important artists of the first half of the twentieth century. Dallas' Nasher Sculpture Center has a wonderful half-hour YouTube video about her collaboration with her husband Jean Arp, which you can watch below.  

But the NYRB isn't only the biweekly print edition - it is also a remarkable blog where some of the posts rival or exceed contributions in the print magazine. I am thinking for instance about Jhumpa Lahiri's piece on the novel Beyond Babylon by Igiaba Scego (Lahiri now writes in Italian and was on leave from her creative writing position at Princeton for 2018-19, a year she spent living in Rome) and a memoir-like essay by Anastasia Edel about her mother's life as a piano teacher at the Institute of Culture in the agricultural city of Krasnodar, back in the days of the Soviet Union, with all the party intrigues one can imagine - and to think that her mother passed up a chance to study at the Moscow Conservatory under Dmitry Shostakovich, a friend of the family, to marry a man she divorced only a few years later and end up in that city. (Given my interest in Russia and the former Soviet Union, I always read everything connected to Russia from start to finish.) I

Another great piece by Anastasia Edel is about my favorite composer, Dmitry Shostakovich, and an episode where he composed music for a ceremony in Novossibirsk to commemorate the city's liberation from the Germans in September 1943. City officials wanted to add sounds to the Flame of Eternal Glory and thus petitioned the Composers' Union. The petition, which landed on Shostakovich's desk, was signed by the author's grandfather, and Edel makes those months of 1943 come vividly alive. (Shostakovich reused the opening of his entry for the USSR anthem competition, which he had lost.) The author's mother, discussed in the other essay, also makes an appearance, in particular when she wants to make Shostakovich's Babi Yar her thesis project, a matter Shostakovich advised her to drop because of the controversy surrounding the symphony in the Soviet Union, and the author also shares her own admiration at her grandfather and the famous musician who was a friend of the family, through two photographs her mother kept in the apartment. "What I did gain from Shostakovich’s invisible presence in the cramped khrushchevka apartment in which I grew up was the sense of tantalizing proximity to genius and history and to the men who made it—one with music, another with the monument that enshrined it. Both still awe me." One can only hope she is going to put all of her memories into a book some day soon. 

 

NYRB's June 6 issue

I always love the New York Review of Books, but the June 6 issue was particularly good, bringing together so many great writers I adore, publishing reviews about books I've just bought and telling me about movies and artists I can't wait to discover more about.

I'd noticed on the cover the names of Alma Guillermoprieto and Anne Applebaum so I knew from the start I was going to spend a lot of time reading this issue. Applebaum in particular belongs to my pantheon of my favorite female writers, right up there with Jane Mayer. She always writes compellingly about difficult topics, from the Gulag to the crushing of Eastern Europe after World War II to the famine in Ukraine under Stalin. Her essay discusses a recent book by Ian Kershaw on Europe from 1950 to 2017. The main point she makes is that for the most part the book covers much similar material to Tony Judt's Postwar, except for the fact that it extends about a decade after the end of Judt's book, and that extra decade is key in witnessing critical changes about the perception of Europe and even the likelihood of its survival as an institution. 

I've also read Guillermoprieto's prose many times in The New Yorker and the NYRB, as well as her books on dancing for Cuba and dispatches from Latin America. Her essay was the transcript of the Robert B. Silvers lecture she gave at the New York Public Library back in December. It is a haunting account of her early days as a reporter in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, and of the misery that Richard Nixon's war on drugs has brought to the region.

I picked up the biography of diplomat Richard Holbrooke by George Packer (who wrote the National Book Award winner The Unwinding a few years back) at the bookstore the other day so I was thrilled to see it was the object of a review in the NYRB. Those reviews are always so informative and help me focus on the most important part of the book. Here, what stuck with me was the revelation that, on a fateful day in Sarajevo, 3 U.S. diplomats died because Holbrooke liked speed and the car he was in was going too fast down a treacherous, windy road (well-known to be treacherous). The heavier vehicle behind it that the 3 U.S. aides were in was trying to catch up with Holbrooke's car and went off the road. Such a waste because someone liked speed too much. (The book review is aptly named The Fog of Ambition, in an allusion to Robert McNamara.) After I read that I was glad that Packer's verdict on Holbrooke was "almost great" (emphasis on almost), the story of a man who wanted to do a lot more and fell short. We don't need people like that to achieve greatness, thank you very much. Oblivion will do just fine. 

Two other gems in this issue of the NYRB were the article about jazz musician Don Cherry (I was almost at the end of the article before I realized his children were pop star Neneh Cherry and singer Eagle-Eye Cherry, whom I remember listening to when I was much younger) and the review of the prize-winning movie - at the Cannes Festival - Capernaum. I also enjoyed reading the review of the book Churchill: Walking with Destiny, of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of art and identity in the ancient Middle East and of the exhibition that stopped by Houston last year on the royal arts of Jodhpur. I didn't care for the book of stories by Karen Russell but other than that I liked just about everything in this issue.

Review of "Path to Power: The Years of LBJ vol.1"

I've been trying to read that book for a long time, and in the end getting the audio version of it is what did the trick. I first discovered the audio versions of Caro's books when I purchased "The Passage of Power: The Years of LBJ vol.4" (about the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath) as an audiobook, read by the spellbinding Grover Gardner, having had the volume 1 in paperback for a while then, along with Caro's tome on Robert Moses, and yet having been unable to read either past the first few chapters, because their page counts reach about 1000 and the task looked too formidable and my schedule too crammed with other things for me to have any chance to ever finish those books. But back in those years I lived in Pennsylvania and driving down to DC fairly often - a three-hour drive each way - and the Passage of Power audiobooks provided the perfect companion to a drive through the fields of Pennsylvania and Maryland, as well as, later, "Being Nixon: A Man Divided" by Evan Thomas, a book I'll get back to when I write my review of his biography of Sandra Day O'Connor.  

So I finally "read" the LBJ volume 1 book and my conclusion is that Robert Caro is a national treasure, although LBJ is such a deeply flawed individual that every time I was tempted to feel sorry for him, for instance when "Pappy" O'Daniel apparently stole the 1941 election from him on Election Day, he later did something to make me stop feeling sorry for him very fast, such as the way he went about to use FDR and put an end to the tax investigation into the great LBJ donors Brown & Root. The hardscrabble upbringing and outsized ambition make LBJ a fascinating character, but it is a good thing we all know his ambition was felled down because of Vietnam, although I wish it had been felled down earlier. 

What interested me the most in this LBJ profile, or what I know of it (which right now is limited to the first and fourth volume of Caro's biography, although now that I live in Texas I have bought more books about LBJ, especially the Doris Kearns Goodwin one and the Califano memoir), is the ups and downs LBJ had to face in his career to get to where he wanted. These days would-be self-styled influencers try to gain followers by claiming one just has to think success and it will materialize easily if one imagines it vividly enough, but no one wanted success more than Lyndon Johnson and he still faced a couple of heartbreaking defeats, high-stakes elections including the 1948 one that he could not lose if he hoped for any sort of political future, and of course the years he spent powerless in the shadow of JFK. He does provides a certain lesson in resilience, although his accompanying cunningness was nothing to emulate. But he is a good example for students that sometimes you can want something completely and absolutely and still not get it for a while, and face setbacks, and have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. 

LBJ was overall a very unlikable man, and I hold against him the way he later treated Sam Rayburn, a man who viewed LBJ as his own son and was instrumental to his political ascent. (He betrayed Rayburn in 1940 by working behind the scenes to keep the Texas delegation for FDR, although of course when it became politically convenient LBJ ditched FDR too.) It is hard to extract any high-level lesson from LBJ's life. Some people would argue that LBJ got to have a lot more impact on the country than Rayburn ever did, but he took such pains in creating his legend (a legend not pierced through until Caro started working on his biography) that he can't have been indifferent to people learning the truth about him. I wonder what Caro's fifth volume about LBJ will say. It will cover the end of his presidency and the few years he survived his loss of power. Will Caro show us a man with remorse? or only regrets that he couldn't hold on to power longer? 

 

Review of "Working" by Robert Caro

 I really wanted to like this book. I really, really wanted to like this book. I have read or listened to the audiobooks of all 4 volumes of his LBJ biography (while impatiently waiting for the 5th and last installment), and I have The Power Broker about Robert Moses on my shelves. Caro has a very distinctive writing voice, only enhanced by the narration of Grover Gardner. He has been able to unearth key details about his subjects - for instance, before he came along, biographies of LBJ all portrayed the young Lyndon as well-liked among his peers, and it took Caro's digging to realize this was only a legend fostered by LBJ and his allies. When The New Yorker published excerpts of his essays on writing, I was thrilled to realize Caro's writing voice shone through there as well and I pre-ordered Working with great hopes of learning more about Caro's working process. I did learn that he put an unusual emphasis in imagining each scene from his character's viewpoint, asking key witnesses again and again what they saw and heard until they got angry with him, but overall the best parts of Working were all published in The New Yorker, and there wasn't much new material that I felt warranted the publication of this book. Caro does say that he is also at work on an autobiography, and that will certainly make for a great book. I don't think that it was essential to publish Working, but at least Caro will get the royalties instead of having the money accumulate posthumously when some other editor would have put together some of his writing. Get The New Yorker issue that published the book excerpts, even at the $8.99 cover price, you won't miss much from the parts of the book that aren't in it. But I'm still very much looking forward to the 5th volume of the LBJ biography and Caro's own autobiography. 

Reading Faulkner

Last month I finally read Faulkner - Faulkner's stories, that is, for a book club I took part in. Like Shakespeare, Faulkner is an icon of the English literature whom I heard about back in high school (in Belgium) twenty-five years ago but truly discovered rather late in life. While I adore Shakespeare's plays, I doubt I'll ever love Faulkner's works a third as much, but I was amazed by his insights into human nature and the originality of his plots.

Most of the stories we read have been collected in this book, although the one that stuck out most in my mind, The Unvanquished, is not. (But it makes a chapter of Faulkner's eponymous novel, which is easy enough to get.) I liked The Unvanquished because of the grandmother, a woman with great resilience, grit and outright "spunk" in spite of her old age. The characters are unique and clearly defined, and have strong motivations that make for spellbinding conflict.

(Warning: the following paragraphs contain spoilers.)

The first story of Faulkner's I ever read is the first one in the book, Barn Burning. In it, a young boy tries to warn a landowner that the boy's father is going to set fire to his barn, but the landowner arrives too late. I watched The Long, Hot Summer starring Paul Newman last summer (a very bad movie that even Paul Newman couldn't save) and interestingly enough, Barn Burning recounts the incident that kicks the young boy out of town, while Long, Hot Summer follows the boy, now grown-up, as he returns to town. Although I knew the story's ending because of the movie, Faulkner's prose still took my breath away. The story just gripped me and didn't let go.

Another story that I couldn't stop thinking about was Dry September, a story where a white thirty-something spinster, who had once been the life of the party and realized last that she wouldn't get married, accuses a black man of assaulting her. This results in the black man's murder by a posse of white men, in spite of the white barber's insistence that the black man didn't do it. The white woman's female friends give her fleeting attention, but soon everything will return to normal, except that the black man's death weighs on the white woman's conscience. She has a breakdown where she can't stop laughing hysterically.

When we discussed this story in the bookclub and the book club leader asked what the woman's problem was, an older woman with her hair dyed brown, maybe sixty-eight years old wanting to look fifty (in other words, not young but not the very elderly people the book club can attract), exclaimed gleefully "she didn't get picked up!" When you saw the sheer delight on her face, you could only imagine how life must have been for an unmarried woman in the South sixty or seventy years ago. What stayed with me in the story is that the woman hadn't been a particularly mean or vicious girl growing up, in fact it seemed that she had been quite popular and just as nice as the next person, and yet her life went off track (because of her parents, if I remember correctly). She committed that awful act, accusing an innocent black man, and in the end it only succeeded in pushing her further off the deep end.

Two other stories I recommend are A Rose for Emily and Centaur in Brass. I have to say, I didn't see the ending of A Rose for Emily coming. It is told for the point of view of the townspeople, who believe that Emily is an odd, harmless but determined elderly lady and who speak of her in a somewhat condescending tone, so I didn't think the smell outside the house that they get rid of without telling Emily was that of a corpse and I didn't think she had used the arsenic she had bought from the pharmacist to kill him. (I thought she might want to kill herself.) It's only at the end of the story that we find out that she keeps the corpse of her beau in a bedroom upstairs. He thought he could leave her? He should have thought again. Obviously she was unhinged, but she is such a great character.

If Barn Burning and The Unvanquished have Ab Snopes as the "bad" character (barn burner and horse thief), Centaur in Brass is about Ab Snopes's son Flem, who is supposed to come back so ethical and handsome in The Long, Hot Summer (under the name of Ben Quick) and, in Faulkner's story, is stealing brass from the factory he supervises but is ultimately defeated by his black employees. I always love a good story where both sides are very shrewd.  

That Evening Sun was also quite stunning in its description of a black woman's fear that her violent man has come back into town. It is not clear he did, the story is told from the point of view of the young children of the white man who employs the black woman and they clearly don't believe he's back, but all the signs point toward him being back nonetheless, and the woman being about to be killed.

I haven't written a story in many years, but reading Faulkner's stories made me remember how much I liked the genre, back in the days.