From the monthly archives: March 2015

I’d much rather read a debut novel that aims high and falls short than one that aims low, or like much commercial fiction, doesn’t need to aim at all. When said novel combines a few of my favorite themes – New York City, Russia, music, technology, and a earnest love story – and the publicity machine behind the novel is silent and rusted, I’m in.

Sean Michaels’ Us Conductors centers on the invention of a very strange instrument, the Theremin, which makes sound by the conductance of electric current through the human body. (You make sounds/notes by waving your arms around, much like an orchestra conductor or band leader). Around this invention, at the beginning of the last century, Michaels builds an elaborate decades-spanning tale of U.S. – Russian espionage, fierce competition among U.S. corporations for new gadgets and devices, other more nefarious applications of the scientific (physics) principles behind the theremin (e.g., bugging devices), American prosperity and depression, birth of Lenin’s communism and its growth into oppressive regimes under Stalin and later rulers, musical composition and performance, and more.

But what clearly challenges Michaels’ imagination is the love story between  Clara, the violinist in Manhattan who becomes his star pupil/player of his instrument, and Dr. Termen, the often naive, self-absorbed behavior obsessive compulsive inventor, if not genius. From early in the story to near the end, Termen is a prisoner, first as a corporate/state spy for Russia in America (how he enters the country), then as an accused traitor who betrayed his country. Without the love story, the beauty of the musical interludes, some human dignity passages in the gulag, and Termen’s will to survive, the reader would suffocate breathing in the tragedy of this man’s life, especially in the second half of the novel.

Fortunately, for a novel with more moving and stationary pieces and parts than a Steinway piano, Michaels’ use of mostly short, choppy sentences, brisk dialogue, lots of white space, and a first-person narration keeps the story from getting mired in the mud. There were moments when I feared the story would fall into melodrama. At one point, I thought, Michaels must have just watched The Shawshank Redemption. At another, I thought he must have just listened to Quartet for the End of Time composed by Messiaen (or read the story behind its birth, a tale of musicians in prison during WWII).

Frequently, Michaels use of similes and analogies seemed out of step. “The sound of the snow was like pepper crushed in a mortar.” I kept trying to square these two sounds and couldn’t. Or this: “Now, in a bare room across the world, I leave commas on the page…like eyelashes.” And this: “The wind howled like an abandoned child.” This is the kind of writing that sounds lovely, until I think about whether it actually works. I can also see where other readers would disagree. How about this: “Slowly you raised your bow and began to saw low notes like a comet at low velocity.” Has anyone heard a comet at low velocity? I suppose it’s a legitimate observation from the character’s mind (a physicist) but for us readers, not so sure.

But then this will appear on a the page: “The sum of all those years draining away, meaningless, before the empty fact of the present.” What a brilliant description of the exact point between his life in America and his emerging one as a traitor/prisoner back in Russia! There is a lengthy scene where Termen sneaks into a building (to steal corporate files) and kills a man, which I had trouble visualizing. However, I will say the last lines are a brilliant, nerdy, soul-crushing summation of his love for Clara.

I suppose this qualifies as historical fiction as much of the story is based on Termen’s life. The author acknowledges his debt to Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage, Albert Glinsky, but adds that his account is full of distortions, omissions, and lies.

Best of all, I stumbled into this novel browsing one of our local independent bookstores. I hadn’t even heard of the title or the author (and I spend a great deal of time searching for offbeat novels like this one). In the world of fiction (or music for that matter), nothing is more satisfying than discovering a new artist who pushes all your buttons and getting acquainted without any introductions or pre-conceived notions from others. I prefer not to be “played” by the constant drone of publicity (though how realistic is that?)

I certainly don’t wish for Michaels to toil in obscurity, though. I hope this blog post will turn other readers on to Us Conductors. It aims high – very high – but only falls a bit short.

I just finished two of the most depressing novels ever. One was great. One was not. Both are, at base, about solitude. It’s not a happy place.

Stoner, John Williams, published in 1965, doesn’t rest on the tip of the collective tongue when it comes to great novels or novelists. Several times the past few years it appeared on my radar. Finally I bought it, and the bookstore clerk raved when I brought it to the cashier. Still, it took me a while to get to it.

In some ways it’s a recast of the biblical story of Job. Shit rains on this guy, William Stoner, son of a Missouri dirt farmer, who becomes a professor of English at the University of Missouri. That’s about where the positivity ends.

The timeline spans pre WWI to after WWII. Stoner’s father sends him off to college to become an agricultural engineer. He returns (briefly) as an English major, then leaves for good to pursue a graduate degree.

Two institutions which can nurture you as an adult, your family and your workplace, don’t for Stoner. His wife should be on meds if they had the right ones back then. His academic department has it in for him. His two buddies, if you can call them that, go to war (WWI) and Stoner does not. One comes home in a box. The other becomes head of the English department. He tries to do right by Stoner but he is contradicted by the larger powers of the academic institution.

The life of the mind becomes the only aspect of life where Stoner finds relief. But it is solitary relief. Even his daughter, with the help of her mother, becomes distant.

In middle age, Stoner has an affair with a young graduate student. She leaves so that they both avoid the inevitable scandal.  He publishes a scholarly book that “was forgotten and that served no use.” He dies of cancer at the end.

Yet, his plight is riveting. His will to survive, to be someone other than a dirt farmer, to progress from physical toil to life of the mind and educate others, to rise above the anguish and his station in life, gripped me. Stoner truly is about shoveling shit against the tide and believing at death that you somehow beat the odds. “…we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive – because we have to.” (p. 32). ”

And of that useless book, his thoughts in the moments before life is extinguished: “He did not have the illusion that he would find himself there, in that fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of him that he could not deny was there, and would be there.” The novel and his life end while he his fondling the book.

This isn’t a spoiler because the plot will have nothing to do with your enjoyment. It’s all in the language, the economy, the precision, how haunting it is in its portrayal of a “normal” life. And it is a normal life. We will all find ourselves here, with Stoner, not forever, and maybe not for very long, but at some point(s), for no one lives without doubt about what it all means and why we have to suffer so.

In the end, Stoner is about the reality of life, the pain of the soul exposed by the erosion of almost all things that might protect it with meaning, the things we might have left behind, the connections with others which might live on, but will also end, and how we must rise above it all to keep on, because we must.

“A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.”

[I have to add here that the lyrics at the end of the Moody Blues song, “The Balance” (from A Question of Balance), appeared as I read the ending two weeks ago and those words have not left my head since. “Just open your mind, and realize…the way it’s al–ways been, just open your heart…”]

And so maybe it is because I live in Missouri now, but lived in NYC for many years, and read The Transcriptionist back to back with Stoner, that I pair them in a single blog post. It’s probably not fair. This is Amy Rowland’d debut novel. It also is about the solitary life, in similar ways to Stoner, the discarded life.

Lena, the protagonist, transcribes stories for a major New York Newspaper (assumed to be the Times because Rowland herself was a transcriptionist for the paper). She’s the only one transcriptionist left and occupies an old room once filled with many toiling at the same function.

She lives the life you’ve read about, heard about, seen movies about, the single female in Manhattan -poor, lonely, creeping towards middle age, on the edge. Mercifully, through a pigeon on the ledge of her office and a woman more on the edge than Lena, whom Lena encounters briefly on a bus, Rowland leads Lena to salvation, away from the edge (and more accurately, the ledge) and exposes for us her new-found dignity as a member of the human race, a member who no longer needs the newspaper.

The woman, Arlene Lebow, is a blind court reporter (get the connection to Lena?) who takes her own life swimming in the moat at the lion’s den in the zoo.

Lena’s colleagues at the newspaper don’t fare well. They serve as stereotypes solely to heighten Lena’s sensitivity to what’s happening around her (the aftermath of 9/11, for one thing). There’s just something off about all these characters. They are too one-dimensional. As an example, a speech by Ralph, the paper’s head honcho, goes like this: “…we are gathered here today to issue escape hoods to our valued staff. It is true that our country is at war. And we, the voice of the people, the voice for the people, we are under attack as well. As I’m sure you know, one of our most esteemed colleagues, Katheryn Keel, received personal threats this week, along with an envelope containing white powder…”

Banal is probably being kind here.

I noted at the top that it wasn’t a great book. It’s not a bad novel either. I am a sucker for novels about NYC, any time period. But this was a rare case when my understanding of, and experience with, the city got in the way of my enjoyment of the story. The ending doesn’t work. Just doesn’t. But I have sympathy. Endings are so difficult. But I could see what the author was striving for: How the craziest things, wanting to save a pigeon (a pigeon?? this ex-New Yorker asks) and demanding an obituary in the “paper of record” for Arlene (Lena essentially holds the paper hostage to achieve this), help you find the meaning in your own life and give you the strength to disrupt it for the better. Depressing, yes. Poignant? Almost. But there’s a lilt to Rowland’s style, a naivete to her protagonist, a minimalist sensibility, and a genuine desire to lampoon modern journalism. These elements work well together.

I’m going to bet Rowland’s second will be worth reading.

 

It’s not everyday that you go to hear chamber music and Beethoven happens to be the most avant garde composer you hear.

Okay, that’s not strictly the truth. The second String Quartet by Sofia Gubaidulina, composed in 1987, and performed by the Arianna String Quartet last night at the Touhill Performing Arts Center in St. Louis, was way more “out there.” In a relative sense, though, the Beethoven Grosse Fuge, was the more experimental, given that it was composed more than 150 years prior. I had not read the liner notes before hearing, but I had pondered that this had to be late Beethoven, maybe even close to the last composition he ever penned. It had a complexity that belied its composer (based on what most of us have heard before, anyway), dissonance, syncopation, and atonality.

If the composer hadn’t been named, I would have guessed, except for a few passages which were dead Beethoven giveaways, that the piece came from the late 1800s, maybe even the early part of the twentieth century. I was vindicated upon reading the program notes. Stravinsky, described as “one of the great artistic innovators of the twentieth century,” said of it, “this absolutely contemporary piece of music will remain contemporary forever.” It appeared to require a huge amount of energy from the players, who seemed only too willing and able to oblige to the fullest.

As interesting, the work was originally the sixth and last movement of the Opus 130 string quartet. Six movements! But it overwhelmed the audience apparently, so Beethoven wrote a more acceptable one and the Grosse Fuge was issued as a stand-alone composition. While we consider him the master of master composers today, even he had to cow-tow to his audience and patrons.

I’m not even close to a critic or even steeped enough in contemporary chamber music to say much about the Gubaidulina piece, except that it reminded me of Xenakis and a few others I have heard who, best as I can describe it, play with ribbons of sound. Their compositions are characterized by, not so much whole, half, quarter, or any other of the conventional discrete notes, but by streams tossed, thrown, pitched, stretched, compressed, or simply floated into the air. These compositions are a real contrast to the contemporary minimalist composers who go in the opposite direction and take discrete notes and repetition and patterns and rhythms, and subtle changes to them over time, to logical extremes.

The evening closed with Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet (Opus 44), for which the guest pianist, Einav Yarden, joined the strings. Lush and lovely, of course, but what struck me was the second movement. While described as a “funeral march with two interesting interludes,” I found it to be ethereal, dream-like, hallucinogenic even. Of course, being an amateur viola player, I was captivated by violist Joanna Mendoza’s presentation of the strong solo towards the end of the movement. Apparently, there are only a few “monumental” piano quintets from the Romantic era, Brahms and Dvorak penning the others.

I appreciated the liner notes by Kurt Baldwin, Cellist. They seemed more digestible than most program information I read at these types of events.

Learn more about this wonderful staple of St. Louis’ classical music scene: www.ariannaquartet.com

 

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