Love notes

An Equal Music - Vikram Seth (Vintage International, 1999)

So I really have been reading, I swear. Watch this mass of posts I'm about to drop on you. :)

I really love how Seth writes. He's beautiful and eloquent without being particularly difficult, so there's an easy flow and rhythm to reading him. (This was of course particularly the case with Golden Gate.) But I just never fell in love with this book. I wanted to. I kept waiting to feel utterly engaged, but I guess that the characters held themselves at such remove that I always felt kept at arm's length. I have to assume this was purposeful, but since I tend to want to fall headlong into my novels, it was difficult for me.

But if you are interested in the world of European musicians, it's still a lovely read. Michael is a violinist in a London quartet, haunted by the love he lost in Vienna when he fled with little warning. From what I can tell, he had serious issues with panic, and working with his mentor there was eating away at him. [With this, I can sympathize.] The lost Julia reappears, through a bus window, and slowly makes her way back into his world. She is married and has a small child, but their lives entangle once more, and she travels with the quartet to Vienna.

There's more to it -- a secret, another panic attack, an elderly and lost father and aunt back in the rural working-class North, and a violin which doesn't belong to him, but which is truly the greatest love and partnership Michael has ever known -- but it's not particularly a plot-driven novel. It's more about the vignettes of thought, observation, remembrance. If I knew more about music, I would venture to guess that the structure is somewhat reminiscent of some sort of work of composition, études maybe?

Could this be love?

I Think I Love You - Allison Pearson (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, advance reader's edition)


I had quite the crush on NPH (I mean, obviously) in his Doogie Howser days. And I seem to remember several months of adoration for Christian Slater. But my teen passion was for an athlete, which somehow felt much different (to me) than loving a teen heartthrob. I jealously guarded my love for Paul Kariya, and didn't have to share him with the other hoards of teen girls.

But then, I could still identify with Petra and her girlfriends, and the way they felt about David Cassidy. That feeling that somehow he was reaching out directly to you, even as - in their case, at least - it was about the connections you make with the girls around you as well.

Anyway, so Petra has a new best friend, and they hover on the orbit of one of those stereotypical queen bees, who existed even in Wales of the 1970s, it turns out. Their bond: Cassidy, who helps them weather the storms of adolescence. The greatest storm though, arises from their misadventures trying to see him in concert.  At the same time, young college grad Bill turns out to *be* David Cassidy, or rather to channel his voice for one of those teeny-bopper magazines. This is hugely embarrassing, and yet it's his life.

Fast forward a quarter-century. Petra is mourning her mother, her failed marriage, and her inability to protect her teen daughter from the hurts that plagued her. But then she finds a lost letter, and a chance to go back in time, and maybe let her teenage self have the experience of a lifetime.

It's not just a love story between a man and a woman, or a man and millions of girls. It's also about love between friends, the complications of familial love, and the ways we tie ourselves in knots trying to be the "right" thing for the ones we love. I didn't know what to expect when I picked this up, but it was warm and comforting. A good find.

Hell-o Starling

Bright's Passage - Josh Ritter (Dial Press, 2011)

I am a sucker for "Snow is Gone." I could just listen to it over and over again. I'm still discovering Ritter's other songs, but it alone was enough to get me excited when I saw he was coming out with a debut novel this summer.

Bright's Passage is lyrical and fascinating, but devoid of the joy that drew me to the songs. It makes sense; what joy is to be found in a hard world, where the trauma of the First World War is followed by the trauma of losing one's wife in childbirth and fleeing the raging inferno that has taken over your home? The chapters alternate between Bright's attempts to make his way with his newborn son and his experiences on the front lines of a war that was all over except for the brutal and senseless killing. Plus, we get a peek at the opaque menace that is Bright's father-in-law, out for revenge. As a result, the book just gets harder and harder and harder to read. Which is, I must believe, Ritter's intent.

Nothing has ever convinced me that war is anything other than hell. And this novel places it on a continuum of horrors that have followed Bright from childhood. No wonder he has picked up an angel, who offers the promise of something better. Perhaps.

The questions of redemption is left until the final pages, which is all I will say about that. Can there be such a thing as redemption in a world where such arbitrary violence is allowed to occur?

La sua cantante

Bel Canto - Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 2001)

I feel like there was this period right around my college graduation where everyone on BART was reading The Poisonwood Bible and Bel Canto. I never got around to the former (though I've read other Barbara Kingsolver) but came across a copy of the latter, so after sitting on my shelf for awhile, it made it onto my list of books to read this year. And I'm glad - it made for a particularly nice antidote to the anxiety of White Noise.

While reading, I kept finding myself thinking of the Stanford Prison Experiment. This novel presented a scenario almost the opposite. A group of commandos, terrorists, guards, set against their hostages, or prisoners. And unlike the escalating cruelty that occurred in the basement of Jordan Hall, the story of the two groups stuck in the Vice Presidential mansion of an unnamed Latin American country is one of relationships built and humanity in ascendancy. Over the weeks and months of confinement, they create a new reality, to the point that several never really want it to end - and even fewer are willing to admit the only possible way that it can end.

This raises a few questions. Does the initial power imbalance account for the differences? At Stanford, you have a group of peers, randomly assigned positions of power or subjection. In Patchett's novel, the prisoners represent the powerful and privileged, and in a sense swing the pendulum back to an original state as the authority of the generals slowly (or rapidly?) erodes. Or is it a timing issue? Zimbardo called things off after 6 days, when they got out of control. In the novel, the situation drags on for months. After 5 days, the guards and generals are still very much in power. Had the Stanford Prison Experiment lasted longer, would relationships have been forged and equilibrium restored? And of course, it's useful to remember that I'm talking about a novel and not real life.

Anyway, at one point in the reading, the phrase "recklessly beautiful" came to mind. I don't know exactly what I mean, but it seems appropriate. The characters fall prey to beauty - to the beauty of music, of love. Their embrace of it leads them to live recklessly, carelessly. Not in their actions per se, but in their suspension of disbelief, that this world could continue, or that things could all come out all right in the end.

So you're left with this mesmerizing story, that invites you too to set aside the dark undertones, to ignore the threatening moment. And believe, for a few pages, in something magical. You can know in the end that the system always wins, and still believe that maybe this time it won't. Or that even when it does, the interlude made it worth it.

[Also, the characters! They are treated with a lot of love. I should have allotted them more time. It's the minor characters that made the book: the vice president turned cleaning crew, the French ambassador, the loud and romantic and ridiculous Russians, the singing terrorist, the chess-playing general. They sound so cheesy when reduced to these terms. They were not.]

"Happinesses opted against" or, an iPod love affair

The Song is You - Arthur Phillips
New York: Random House, 2009

I was recently commenting that Phillips has written four very different novels, starting with the Eastern European ex-pat novel in Prague, and then an Egyptology mystery and a Victorian ghost story before this latest about the unlikely romance between a music fan and an up-and-coming singer-songwriter set in present-day New York City. Except that there are thematic similarities. I mentioned in one of those previous reviews that he likes to play with the subjectivities of reality as experienced by different people. That continues here, as Phillips layers actions and memories, such that you are constantly forced to re-conceive of what happened in the previous pages.

Plot brief: Julian is a somewhat-jaded tv commercial director who has lost his wife and son, his libido, and is struggling to hold onto memories of the power of song. Until he comes across Cait O'Dwyer, a young Irish musician who is about to make it big. Julian's estranged wife and Asperger-y brother are also lost and damaged, and so are the other men orbiting around Cait: her guitarist and collaborator, a policeman who much prefers Sinatra, and a washed-up rocker who grasps desperately at a chance to feel fame again. Phillips sets up a whole array of other storylines that could be, most of them freighted with a hint of impending menace. I read nervously, unsure when a misunderstanding - that subjective reality - would lead to disaster. Whatever disaster means.

The novel also contains some lovely musings on the power of music and the way certain songs elicit longing and evoke times and places. And how their power loses potency when called upon too often, or wrongly. It made me want to empty my iPod of all those podcasts and just trip down memory lane, one song at a time.

Erin reads The New Yorker

...and links to random things that catch her fancy.

from July 28:
Jonah Lehrer, Annals of Science, "The Eureka Hunt," The New Yorker, July 28, 2008, p. 40
I knew I was right about this!

The insight process, as sketched by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focused, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight. "The relaxation stage is crucial," Jung-Beeman said. "That's why so many insights happen during warm showers."

fave Aleksandar Hemon has a new book, and is separated at birth from another fave?

(left, Hemon; right, Vladimir Mayakovsky)



from Aug. 4:
Sasha Frere-Jones explains contemporary popular rock:

The main antecedent [to Coldplay's sound] is U2, who invented the form that Coldplay works within: rock that respects the sea change of punk but still wants to be as chest-thumping and anthemic as the music of the seventies stadium gods. Translated, this means short pop songs that somehow summon utterly titanic emotions and require you to skip around in triumphant circles and pump your fist, even if it is not entirely clear what you are singing about.

from Aug. 11 & 18:
Matthew Dickman writes a lovely and haunting poem mostly about suicide, that includes the following line: "If you are/travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially/on a train." Sound advice.

Another thing I'm behind on...

For some reason, I never get around to reading Boldtype in a timely fashion. It arrives in my inbox once a month of so (except when it gets filtered into spam) and there it sits, waiting for me to realize that it'll only take me about 5-10 min to go through it.

BT is part of the Flavorpill network, which describes itself thusly: "Flavorpill loves culture. We embrace the high-brow, the underground, the low-brow, and the mainstream, and everything in between – as long as it's good." And BT does indeed have some good selections, alongside things that are just too too hipster for me. (And that link doesn't really get at the depths of hipsterdom.)

So why can't I get around to reading it? What is this procrastination?

BTW, did you know that Lily Allen, whose "Smile" brightened much of my spring, is a "passionate reader" who will be judging Britain's Orange Prize? Nor did I, until I read Boldtype.