"How to Read a Book" by Monica Wood

The lives of three people—a young woman named Violet and two more mature people named Frank and Harriet—swirl together in How to Read a Book and each has a life-altering effect on the other two in Monica Wood’s brilliantly plotted and rewarding novel.

The author of the awe-inspiring One in a Million Boy and the soulful My Only Story has published yet another captivating, funny, beautiful character-driven novel. Twenty-two year-old Violet begins the story in prison in Maine, having served more than two years for manslaughter, stemming from an auto accident. Frank and Harriet, two very endearing and perfectly drawn characters, know her in the context of the criminal justice system—more than that I will not say—and each will conclusively end up in her corner as events evolve.

The charm here, and it is a thoroughly affecting charm, is Wood’s endlessly deep and eloquent understanding of, and description of, the emotional lives of her principals. Frank has been widowed not only from his wife, but also from a job from which he retired, but misses badly. Harriet is retired as well; she deals with the difficult love of a niece who will abandon her for the opposite coast, and with losing the most important activity she engages in in this chapter of her life. Violet ties the two together with her tragic mistake three years earlier; all three have a long way to go, and all three help the other two to get there. It’s a balancing act that Wood brings off without strain, mishap, drop, or wobble. It’s just superb.

There are other attractions, other well-drawn characters and effects, but these three characters carry the work, and Wood deserves congratulations and honors for the touching good fortune these three deliver for each other. Rewarding and worthy of the same kind of praise as her past work, How to Read a Book is balanced, true and generous. Recommended!
 

 

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"In the Throes" by Mathias B. Freese

In In the Throes, author Mathias Freese imagines a prehistoric creature called a Gruff, who by dint of sheer intelligence and will breaks through the constraints of pure instinct and finds the fraught gift of awareness. And by ‘awareness’ we mean the full array of reflection and consciousness that we humans function with day to day. It’s an amazing trick for the animal, and after the initial thrill of discovery, the Gruff finds other new thoughts, which you only get when you have the gift of consciousness, like  shock, regret, introspection, and the surprise of guilt.

Freese has carved out for himself a unique challenge. He must establish in a large but nebulously described animal (who shares the landscape with humans) the ability not only to achieve a reflective consciousness, but to understand it and describe it. For that, it needs language. The author finesses the issue somewhat; the protagonist creature can communicate with others of his kind through sophisticated telepathy. So he gives Gruff words to work with, but it is Gruff alone who transcends the base instincts of the others of his species.

And Gruff’s language and depth of thinking rapidly increase and deepen: very soon he is cogitating on such issues as the nature of reality, the self, and the unity of oneself with the landscape and the magenta sky. He even finds enough logic and insight to rebut the existence of the “Image Giver,” which is the term used in this epoch for the purported almighty creator.

Freese sets himself the task of using language to describe a consciousness brand new to this deep and circumspect way of thinking. After a slightly jarring effect at the outset of the book, I found he does a creditable job of it: as the narrative progresses, the question of where this ability comes from ceases to matter. That’s because the author sets out in this book to expound on human consciousness, and uses Gruff to illustrate it. In the Throes is a parable of human thought and endeavor, of the problems which come under consideration when humans start to philosophize.

An interesting exercise in writing and reading, this is. The last quarter of the book is replete with observations on human psychology, and considered statements of philosophy. The novelty of the “graduation” of a prehistoric animal—who befriends a band of humans and protects them and learns enough to teach them—fades and the disguise falls away to reveal a set of aphoristic philosophical tenets, which for me vary in the amount of persuasiveness they carry.

The plot (straightforward) and the level of diction (surprisingly high) both serve the author’s purpose of observing and elucidating human psychology. It’s a highly inventive route for such a discussion, and no less effective for being so. It’s a specialty piece, and those with an interest in this area and an appreciation of human philosophical problems will find cogent argument gracefully presented.

 

 

 

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"Held" by Anne Michaels

Anne Michaels’s Held contains a series of oblique glimpses into the lives of World War I survivors, early British photographers, and present-day globe-trotting doctors to illuminate the devotion, heartache, and abiding love between mortals. Held is a book- length elegy, written in refined but robust language, which achieves striking effects while showing an elegance almost never seen in a piece of this length. It’s superb.

Different sections of this novel portray fraught moments in for people as they yearn for the touch of a loved one, or dream nostalgically, or shed tears of joy with the love of their lives. Characters shine in their moment, whether brightening, illuminating, or vexing. There are cogent, convincing passages here, that show these episodes in high relief. One example: when married, loving doctors Mara and Alan contemplate the newly pregnant Mara’s impending sojourn to a war zone:

We no longer pretend to fight on designated ground, instead recognise the essential substratum where war has always been fought: exactly where we  live, exactly where we have always believed we were sheltered, even sacredly so, the places we sleep and wake, feed ourselves, love each other—the apartment block, the school, the nursing home—citizens ingesting the blast and instantly cast in micronised concrete, rigid as ancient Pompeiians in volcanic ash.”

Then, momentary character Lia, one of the intelligent, seeking women in these pages, meets an artist in a wood in winter in France in 1910. The artist, a photographer, tells her if you leave the shutter open long enough, anything that moves will disappear.  

She thought several things then. That a photographer’s entire life’s work would add up to only a few minutes of time. And that one could make a long exposure—say, thirty years of married life, or family life in a kitchen, infants growing into adults—and all that the photographic plate would show was an empty room. But it would not be empty, instead it would be full of life, invisible and real."

Such reflections feature prominently in the female characters of this book. An ultimate female character of deep reflection and renowned ability, Marie Curie, appears at a fraught moment toward the end of the book, when she has fled Paris for southern Britain, to escape a storm of controversy, unjustly fomented against her.

But this is not a polemic, or it is polemical only in the fairest and most even-handed of ways. The men who love the women in this book are emotional, fanatically loyal, deferent, and devoted.

It’s a hard book to characterize, except in the depths of the emotion displayed. Its diction is of the highest level—and this aspect never flags. Poetry abounds through the sentences; the very ordering of words draws us along so that, even if we never encounter the character again, we’re delighted with the vivid detail and the cogent  emotional content with which they are highlighted. We feel the ache of yearning, and understand through Michaels’s mastery, that it is a constant in human relations; she achieves this through her exacting use of language, her poetry.

This is memorable, heartbreaking, and hopeful. A small gem of a novel that will hold your attention with the author’s challenging concept and her unerring execution.

 

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"The Year 1000" by Valerie Hansen

 

Subtitled: When Explorers Connected the World—And Globalization Began

 

Valerie Hansen, the Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, came upon the idea for The Year 1000 when she reflected on the fact that Norse people landed at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland within a scant few years of when major Central Asian (the Karakhanids taking of Kashgar) and Chinese (Song and Liao dynasties) territorial expansions took place. Each of these important events were deeply influenced by, and in turn, exerted influence on, international trade. Given that the Norse peoples connected Eurasia and the Americas, albeit temporarily, the fact is that this was the first moment when the world had a truly global economy.

Hansen reviews the vast array of data describing international trade of the time. Archeology has shown that trade had flourished in Afro-Eurasia since ancient times. I won’t go into any depth of description here, other than to repeat (because I was not aware of it) that African monarchs initiated trade on their own, across the Sahara into the Middle East, and across the Indian Ocean with Southeast Asia and China. In addition to that, in the Americas, a high volume of commercial trade traveled from the Incan empire, through the Aztec territories, and into Mississippi River sites in the present-day United States.

I have always been interested in trade between nations as a way for merchants to do business, and for ideas to travel and find new adherents, or at least become known if not accepted. Hansen makes the persuasive argument that the practice of monarchs converting to and supporting what she calls “universal religions” in the lands they control resulted directly in the religious blocs in the world today. Europe operated under the sway of the Catholic Church, either Roman or Byzantine, Islam ruled through Northern Africa through to Central Asia, and a patchwork of Hinduism and Buddhism held sway in Southern and Far Eastern Asia. All these choices occurred in the period between roughly 950 to 1100.

Dr. Hansen’s effort succeeds in enumerating the goods which have continually changed hands since the dawn of human history. Her task was to winnow this ancient litany down to a manageable length, and in this I think she succeeds. She has written a book for the general public, easily understood by the modern reader. If you are interested in the history of economic globalization, this well-rounded and disciplined survey would be an excellent place to start. 

 

 

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"One Hour of Fervor" by Muriel Barbery

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

Author Muriel Barbery combines a light touch with deep, enigmatic insights to propel a profound and moving story in One Hour of Fervor. It’s superb, another bravura performance from the novelist who enriched all our lives with The Elegance of the Hedgehog. She sets Fervor in Kyoto, a calm and beautiful city (in which Barbery has a residence), and the culture of this setting affects everything. It strips conversation and action to their essences, with the result that much philosophy and mysticism shine through.

Deep in his core, protagonist Haru is a merchant. But his poet friend passes judgment: he says that for a dumbass from the mountains, Haru has superior taste and a sensitive soul, and because of these virtues, he will be a success. And succeed he does. He nurtures young artists and helps them to material success, and his talent for grace, or its material form, beauty, thrusts him to the top of Kyoto’s art world, and his fame spreads to Tokyo, and national recognition.

But at the center of Haru’s life and success lies a paradox. He will always fail at romantic love, but be a master of friendship. Indeed his friends are steadfast throughout the novel, just as his love life is a series of uncommitted relationships. One of these dalliances, with a French woman, is a pivotal moment, with repercussions that will last all his life.

The spare plot revolves around life-and-death moments, but is rendered cheerfully, and is leavened by frequent citations of Shinto and Buddhist principles, complete with their practical application to the lives of the characters. The entire book comes to us through Alison Anderson’s excellent translation, as low-key, oblique, and tinged with kindness and politesse.

Kindness and politesse graces the emotions and statements — or silences — of the players, and it never stints. It works for the reader, and it works for the characters. One Hour of Fervor stands, and will stand, as a genteel exemplar of right feeling, right thought, and right action. And Barbery’s benign diction shares with the diegesis this refined, almost rarified level of discourse.

This is a gem, a diverting piece of sophisticated storytelling, with memorable characters facing the best and worst that life can dish out. Its even keel feels like a miracle, and it keeps the characters, all of them, safely on board and at least pushing their lives in the right direction.

Again, I need to honor translator Alison Anderson, whose partnership with this author goes back some years. She also translated my only prior experience with Barbery: 2008’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and I will confess that my enthrallment with that novel led to my concern that Fervor would suffer by comparison. But no. This novel confirms for me Berbery’s mastery of plot, character, theme, image, mood, and structure. Not to mention tone, pacing, and wisdom. I’m urging you to take it up!
 

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"The Rise and Reign of the Mammals" by Steve Brusatte

 

Subtitled: A New History, From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

A few hundred thousand years after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, a tiny individual primate called Purgatorius died in the Purgatory Hill badlands of Montana. Its tiny fossilized teeth led scientists to conclude that it was the species that broke away from its insect-eating cousins and was the first primate. Much, much earlier, in the Carboniferous period of Paleozoic Era, about 330 million years ago, the first synapsids split apart from their reptilian contemporaries and started the lineage that led to mammals.

These are two salient points in Dr. Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. Brusatte, PhD, is an American Paleontologist who teaches at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The book’s notes identify him as the author of the international bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. The paleontology advisor on the Jurassic World film franchise, Brusatte has named more than fifteen new species, including the tyrannosaur “Pinocchio rex” (Qianzhousaurus), the raptor Zhenyuanlong, and several ancient mammals.

This is a book by a scientist for the general public. It’s conversational, not overloaded with jargon, and personal: he declaims his own take on the state of the science, and peppers his insights with idiosyncratic anecdotes about the principal intrepid scientists whose discoveries preceded his own. His reverence for these pioneering specialists — his heroines and heroes — never flags.

If you have an interest in the evolution of mammals, I can’t imagine there is a better book or a better author with whom to start.

 

 

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Q & A With Edward Hamlin, Author of "Sonata in Wax"

 

I peppered Edward Hamlin, author of the soon to be released Sonata in Wax, with questions about his novel, and he was gracious enough to answer them. Below are his replies to my impertinent interrogation.

[WARNING: Some of the information that follows contains what might be construed as clues to outcomes, or broad hints, about plot, authorial intent, or sources, etc., pertaining to Sonata in Wax. If you definitely don’t want any information on the book, that probably means you intend to read it, which is certainly the best outcome. If that’s the case, you can give what follows a pass, and return to it after you’ve finished reading the book.]


Basso Profundo: In a piece of correspondence, you mentioned that I “got what you were trying to do" in the novel. What did you mean by that?

Edward Hamlin: When I said I thought you got what I was doing, that was mostly about the centrality of the actual music and the musicians’ interpretation of it—the fact that the music (not just the sonata) was in some ways an important character in the story. Also, you saw how the dual timelines each contribute to the unearthing of the mystery, with the reader having to pick up clues from both.

Let me extract your other questions one by one:

BP: I like how Jacques’s performance of the piece is handled so obliquely. And that you had Loeffler and Casals in the room for it. I doubt I would have had the sophistication or the know-how to handle it as low-key or as subtly as that. The sonata you describe is wildly ahead of its time, with its apparently free form and its jazz passages—I loved it. The presaging of jazz seems like a bold choice on your part. Did you ever have second thoughts about describing it that way?

EH: There were a couple of key plot events that I decided to handle somewhat off-stage—the first performance of the sonata in the Boston timeline, which we experience only through Elisabeth’s fond but fraught recollection, and Robin’s actual breakup with Ben, which we experience only through Ben’s painful memories. These pivotal events are not played out in scene. I could have gone either way with it, but in both those cases the central thing was the protagonist’s lived, emotional experience of the events; I wanted the reader to directly and empathetically experience that response, not so much the events themselves. The emotional gestalt of the events was what was most real for them, so I wanted it to be most real for the reader, too.

As far as the jazz elements in the sonata, no, I had no second thoughts about that. They were always part of the piece musically.

BP: You also did an amazing job of capturing the zeitgeist of the time—what horrors they went through, both the butchery in faraway places and plagues at home. Did you rely on any family lore for that theme, or was it more general, in the well known way a novelist uses his imagination to achieve verisimilitude?

EH: It was mostly research rather than family lore or pure imagination. The really minute details—Elisabeth walking out at night in her “Louis heels,” for example—came from research, but then I had to decide how to use them. Two helpful resources were my friend Ellen Knight, the Winchester town historian who helped me immensely by unearthing articles about the Sanborns all through the writing, and my firsthand familiarity with the Sanborn mansion, which I’ve visited twice. Aigremont has been reclaimed and restored and is now a cultural center. It’s where my grandmother, Helen Sanborn, grew up, as portrayed in the novel. And it’s where my great-grandfather, Oren, frittered away all the money, none of which made it to my generation.

Ellen Knight was very helpful in filling in the blanks in my knowledge of the house. For example, the layout of the basement morgue and the parking spot in back where the corpses were loaded onto trucks, or the back stairs where Westerlake and Elisabeth meet—these were things Ellen helped me fill in and visualize, sometimes with photos she went and took even though the pandemic was on. She was wonderful.

BP: You sure made economical use of your characters. Having Nikki and bringing back Robin as an ally was a very generous tack for your readers. I found it gratifying. Was it part of the plan from the get-go?
 
EH: No, I didn’t know about that until deep into the writing. I had the sense that Nikki would always be at Ben’s side, and I hoped Robin would reappear in his life, but it wasn’t until the big concert began to develop that all the details came to light. I like that element of surprise.

I actually wrote a coda, parallel to the Plum Island coda, to explore what happened with Ben and Robin after that night, but decided in the end not to go there. Better that we all wonder.

BP: Are any of your fictional world class musicians based on actual people? This would probably take a one-word answer, since you obviously can’t name names.

Only obliquely. I’m not immersed enough in the classical music world to set up a guessing game like that. Jérôme Assouline was at one point an actual musician instead, but I later fictionalized him because I wasn’t comfortable making up so much dialogue for the actual, living musician. Ana Clara has elements of several concert pianists of her generation, but she’s her own unique mix of brilliance and hubris. I had a lot of fun creating her, but I really don’t see us being friends anytime soon.

 

Many thanks to Edward Hamlin for his gracious candor. These answers are great, sir!

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"Sonata in Wax" by Edward Hamlin

Your cup will run over when you read Edward Hamlin’s thrilling Sonata in Wax. The author supplies two enthralling narratives which are linked by five frail pieces: Bell Graphophone wax cylinders of a sonata recorded in Massachusetts during the First World War. Both threads contain the dark stain of perfidy: the archaic story arc takes much of its color from the “Kaiser’s War,” which turned Europe into a charnel house; the more recent narrative features the more personal savagery of a revenge-minded  piano-playing diva whose gargantuan ego has been injured. This novel will sweep you up in its hundred-year timeframe, make you marvel at Hamlin’s deft balancing act as the two head to their dénouements. It’s a beautiful book.

The present-day narrative starts with world-renowned recording engineer, Ben Weil (our hero), receiving five wax recording cylinders, recorded 100 years prior at a private piano recital in Boston. An antiquarian from Maine has shipped them to Ben at his Chicago studio with the request that he identify the artist/composer if he can, and please report back to her. Ben immediately becomes intrigued, and he somehow fits his research into his already crazy-hectic schedule.  

The story from one hundred years earlier deals with Elisabeth Garnier, a pretty young Frenchwoman, who works for Alexander Graham Bell, presenting the company’s wares to Boston’s Brahmin elite. Her father Jaques is the virtuoso piano player who has composed the marvel of a sonata. Ben’s research turns up a few tidbits of arcana, but through a misunderstanding arising at a point when Ben is ill and vulnerable, Ana Clara Matta, Brazil’s prima piano virtuoso finds his attempt at scoring the piece and thinks it’s his own composition. The ‘2018 Chicago’ narrative consists of Ben trying in vain to contain the lie that’s not entirely his fault. In his insular world, in which he is a widely respected and sought-after world class professional, the exposure will sink his reputation and end his career in disgrace.

As a layman music lover, I am thrilled at Hamlin’s descriptions of not only lovely passages of music, but also his knowing touch with the subtle flourishes and emphases world-class players add to make them their very own. It is these touches of genius in the rarified air of the very best that make virtuosos rich and famous. He is equally strong when capturing the zeitgeist of World War I Boston; the war plows an entire generation of French men into their graves, and this horror is followed up by another equally ghastly scourge, the 1918 flu pandemic.

Hamlin alternates his timelines expertly, unfolding his two plots to build a terrific tension. His two protagonists are vivid, honestly drawn, and very sympathetic. His secondary characters are fully nuanced, and even his portrayal of historical characters rings true. The clever construction and unerring imagining of characters is the true draw here. This novel builds tension, ties several generations of a prominent American family together, celebrates brilliant music and its equally brilliant performance, and leaves the reader in awe. This is Hamlin’s first foray into full-length fiction; he already won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize in 2015. Take up this lively and imaginative work, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

 

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"Homo Deus" by Yuval Noah Harari

Subtitled: A Brief History of Tomorrow

The ubiquitous public discourse about the moral, technical, and ethical implications of  artificial intelligence serves as a pivot point in, and may actually wake people up to, the baffling future that we are in fact facing today. Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and social philosopher, has done an excellent job recapping a broad range of the outré possibilities humankind faces today. The fact that he calls his book Homo Deus gives a broad hint about some of the things we may see in that future.

Harari briefly treats the prevalent fictions in earlier historical epochs, from our hunter-gatherer roots through to today to trace how these fictions grew and how completely they dominated human thought. First Nature, next God, and finally human beings themselves came to rule the world and to give meaning to the universe. But this historical era won’t last forever, he says. It will give way to a future which features much more extensive human-computer interchange, where machines will know us better than we know ourselves.

Consider: humans already have a broad range of artificial implants in their bodies. They regulate our heart rate, they help motor-compromised people use their limbs, blind people see shades of light, and formerly deaf people hear. Nanobots are currently being used in cancer detection and treatment. We can measure our pulse, respiration, blood pressure, and glucose level with something we simply wear—no implant required. Harari is not alone in thinking that medicine is trending even today toward upgrading the health of healthy people, in addition to its traditional role in treating disease.

Harari spends a significant portion of his book describing the relationship between brain activity and emotion. It’s an acknowledged fact neuroscientists have detected the relationship between areas of the brain and such functions as emotion, perception, language, and so on. Harari hangs his hat on the link between brain processes which we can observe and their corresponding emotions and states of consciousness, and the claim that these process are not free at all, but probabilistic. Here, however, is a quote from one third of the way through the book:
 

However, nobody has any idea how a congeries of biochemical reactions and electrical currents in the brain creates the subjective experience of pain, anger or love. Perhaps we will have a solid explanation in ten or fifty years. But as of 2016, we have no such explanation, and we had better be clear about that.”

 

Nevertheless, the author arrives very quickly at the conclusion that not only are deterministic neurochemical reactions responsible for your choices and outlook, but soon, a network of computers, or super computers, will compile all your Likes, hates, opinions, reviews, and arguments in cyberspace, and build an algorithm of you. You’ll be able to compare two job opportunities, alternative places to live, even choose between potential mates…you won’t have to do your own soul searching, the algorithm will do it for you.

And compilation of everything that I am encompasses and presupposes the most objectionable assertion in the book: that our experiences will mean nothing if we don’t upload them for the world to see. Keeping secrets from the network of information, or otherwise limiting the free exchange of it, becomes the worst crime you can commit. I’m sure I’m just being damned old fashioned when I find this concept a ghastly affront. I cannot see a future in which I agree that I don’t feel anything unless somebody else tells me I do.

Where are the medical advancements headed? Harari sees a possible future where humans who can afford it are given the ability to see in much broader range of the EM spectrum, or can comprehend what it’s like to be a bat, or a dolphin, or an ant. These are the superhumans of the title. One grand thematic contribution of his book: the belief that human life and emotion and freedom will eventually become obsolete (along with free elections and freely consumed goods and capital) in favor of the recognition that organisms are algorithms (already scientific dogma today), and that Earthly existence (or existence anywhere in the universe) will simply be the rapid, efficient, and free processing of information.

This is not a difficult book to read, although long sections of it require you to accept statements that cannot be verified. Harari even says this. This is a visionary piece which deals with human trends and possibilities. As such, it is a highly useful and thought-provoking document. Harari remains one of the more clear-sighted and accessible cultural seers currently available to us. Take this volume up, definitely, if current trends and their possible futures interest you.

 

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"Offerings to the Blue God," stories by Shirani Rajapakse

In her latest collection, Offerings to the Blue God, Shirani Rajapakse revisits themes on which she has expressed herself so forcefully in the past: the cheapness of non-combatant human life when bullies fight wars; the absolute terror many women must feel during life’s ordinary transactions; children forced into a lifetime of slavery, and the particular hopelessness when that child is a girl; and the self-defeating and sometimes infuriating steps one must take to follow pious rituals in supplication to gods whose representatives on Earth are only in it for the money. These themes recur with renewed focus and force in Offerings, plus we glimpse other tropes and new sophisticated structures which flare and flourish in her writing too.

For instance, Rajapakse shows terrific aptitude with stories that harbor surprise twists and “gotchas” at the end, and in each of the two cases here the door slams or the precipice disintegrates, and the results are indeed shocking, even ghastly.

The memorable character in a predicament, and the unadorned, straightforward language are both here in abundance, as we have come to expect from Rajapakse. Her decision to present her evidence in simple, forceful declaratives serves her purpose best, and she uses the tactic to good effect again. She lets her anger show without flash or authorial rant; she lets her readers’ natural vituperation well up from the stories.

But, like a couple of stories published here, this collection itself flies a silver lining, a final story that provides the “gotcha” of a young woman’s decision to turn her back on superstition, cynicism and greed. She makes an emphatic and highly symbolic gesture of discarding the old, which amounts after all to a scrap of paper scrawled with pious claptrap, into a drain in a gutter, flowing with mud and filth. 

Pick up Offerings to the Blue God for her fresh take, and for the promise of hope for a rational world in the future.

 

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