Celebrating the love of writing, reading and music with contemplation and thoughtfulness, in the search for the "grace notes" that add beauty and fun to everyday life
Here's a passage from Paul Bowles' book The Sheltering Sky, which I just saw referenced below a YouTube clip from a fascinating, emotional, incredible Japanese film: Departures. Get it now! Watch it! And be prepared to cry and laugh. Cut and paste this link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiyFeT0Tpkk&feature=related) to listen to the film's main theme, a beautiful solo cello piece, as you read and think about this passge.
"...Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? ...Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless...."
Ernest Hemingway was an infamously unlikeable guy, and Michael Atkinson’s frank portrayal calls for adjusting one’s “empathy” threshold to very low. Atkinson’s premise is that this is what really happened to Hemingway in Spain in 1937, providing the content for his most famous book, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway is a journalist, sending back dispatches to U.S. newspapers about the Spanish Civil War. When a Spanish friend “disappears”, Hemingway throws himself into the fray like the proverbial bulldog clamped onto the bull’s neck, and won’t let go until he finds out the facts.
As a woman reader of historical novels primarily written for women readers, I decided to challenge myself to read a novel about this outrageously macho man, written by a man, to see if the content, style and overall experience could possibly be all that different. Honey, you don’t know the half of it. Atkinson is a good writer and at times, delivers some great sentences; for example, after witnessing a cold-blooded murder, “The inside of his heart was a slightly different country now, cloudier, brutalized by midnights and less beguiled by mornings.” But there’s also non-stop swearing, drinking and passing out, whoring, fighting, beatings, torture, kidnapping, car chases and precious little sleep. The atmosphere is hot, dark, smoky and utterly masculine; the few women who appear are either hard-boiled American dames who cross swords with Hemingway (and lose), or tough Spanish women who defy him then invite him into their beds. Hemingway’s occasional moments of clarity about the meaning and direction of his life, his writing, and his family aren’t enough to make him truly sympathetic, but they help. Occasional observations about the experience of writing are intelligent and interesting; I would have liked more of this and less action-adventure à la Jack Bauer. A challenge for Austenites!
Minatour Books (St. Martin’s Press, New York), August 2010, $24.99, pb, 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0-312-37972-8
Naturally, this particular August in Chicago has to be the Hottest on record for umpty-up years (that's what they say in Chicago) but at least they have perfected the engineering art of Air Conditioning, so the Borders bookstores were cool and dry. Sunday was at Oak Brook, a western suburb in the lazy afternoon, but had a decent crowd with good questions. Tonight was in my home-town of LaGrange, another Borders, and we sold out all the books they had; great group of people with really good questions. And afterwards...burritos and margaritas at Chipotle! yay! I had decided to launch my book tour in Chicago once my hometown relatives decided there was going to be a family reunion (my mom's side, Croation -- check out www.matkovichfamilyreunion.com (a website I created/designed) for more info -- and it coincided nicely with my book's publication date in July. So it's going well, but I sure am looking forward to being back in the cool, very cool (so I hear) foggy summer of San Francisco -- leaving Thursday for the Coast. Yes. Just one more gig tomorrow, at Women & Children First on N. Clark Street in Chicago - looking forward to being there!
I'm starting research for my next historical novel and I've been musing on things medieval. A friend dropped by the other day with a book about the Glastonbury Abbey, a most holy and beautiful place of ruins (blast you, Henry VIII and your greedy minions!). Way back in pre-history, apparently, there were settlements in the area, and it is thought that Druids held ceremonies there in the centuries before the Common Era. By the time the Romans came and went, and Christianity took over, there were hermits and holy folk assembled in small huts on the Glastonbury Plain, which eventually grew into a huge monastic community that lasted well into the 1500's. Absolutely fascinating reading. Sometime in the 1200's, a gravesite was dug up and the remains of a tall man and a blonde woman were unearthed - determined by the abbot at that time to be King Arthur and Guinevere. They were reverently re-buried, but then that darn Henry VIII 'reformed' everything and the grave was despoiled. There's only a plaque there now. Another section of the book talks about the music at the Abbey, and how one of the abbots tried to replace the popular Gregorian chant with "new" music of the day, and wasn't very successful. I'm going to have to dig up my old chant CD's and play it as background while I attempt to start a new novel.
San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum has been hosting an exhibit of a woman scribe (a soferet) who is writing out a Torah - the first five books of Moses, written on sheets of vellum (made from treated, scraped, softened cow-hide -- kosher of course -- and written with a quill pen and special black ink. Her name is Julie - yes, she's a J-Writer - and I met her today when I went down to view her exhibit. Julie is a well-spoken, slightly built young woman who is one of a very, very few women in the world who have trained to be a soferet. Her Torah, when it's finished (probably early next Spring), will be given to some lucky synagogue (reform or conservative, as orthodox congregations would not find a Torah inscribed by a woman to be acceptable) for their use in religious services. And, not only did I meet and speak with her, I gave her a copy of my "J" book - she almost gasped when she saw the cover, and said she couldn't wait to read it! I sure hope she likes it.
Anyone who's in the San Francisco Bay Area should definitely catch this exhibit - check their website (www.thecjm.org) for days and times - it's absolutely fascinating -- and there is a collection of old Torah scrolls and other beautiful, wonderful artifacts both new and historical to help present and explain the Jewish traditions.
The Man from Saigon by Marti Leimbach, Doubleday, 2010
Here's another review I wrote for the May Historical Novel Society Review: An absorbing, often gripping novel of a young woman reporter on tour in war-torn Vietnam in 1967, The Man from Saigon is gritty, realistic and poetically written. Leimbach is a master at describing the visceral: the humidity and heat of the jungle, the ache of hunger, the recoil of the body and the brain under fire, the insanity that comes from being surrounded by bombs falling for hours and bullets like hot rain.
The protagonist, Susan, works for a woman’s magazine in Chicago and is sent to the war to gather human interest stories. She’s not supposed to leave Saigon, but of course she does. She gets drawn in to the addiction of war reporting, inching ever closer to the heavy action while putting light years of distance between her and the ‘normalcy’ of life back in the States—until life in the war zone becomes what’s normal. Two men, the Vietnamese photographer of the book’s title, and another reporter, an American, weave in and out of Susan’s mental, emotional and physical existence in a country too far from home.
The images are often disturbing, but the insights into war and human frailty, love and courage are meaningful and intelligent. An excellent read. -- Mary F. Burns
I recently reviewed Evening's Empire by Bill Flanagan, for the Historical Novel Society (it's online and in their print publication for May 2010). Here's what I wrote:
With a title nod to Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, Flanagan’s 645-page epic about rock music spans more than four decades in the life of the Ravons (Rave-ons), a fictional band that starts in London and careens like a pinball through the music universe that unhinged the popular consciousness with the arrival of the Beatles. The behind-the-scenes tales are told in the steady, likeable, first-person delivery of the band’s manager, Jack Flynn, who starts as a neophyte lawyer who shoulders the management of the Ravons’ tours and music contracts from his firm’s senior partners. The charismatic star—Emerson Cutler—is being sued for divorce and wants to catch his faithless wife in flagrante in a hotel in Spain (as leverage against his own adultery). Jack is dispatched to do the job because “you are young, Flynn. You are part of this…new vogue.” The year is 1967 and Jack’s life is forever changed.
The band members have very distinct personalities, and it’s quite a ride as the group breaks up, reassembles, suffers reversals, betrayals, marriage, divorce, drugs, alcohol, wealth and poverty. Seen through the pragmatic eyes of Jack—the manager as confessor/father/nursemaid/fixer—the last four decades of the 20th century come alive in small details that give rise to larger, context-setting philosophical musings about how humans respond to the changing culture with fear and love, wit and courage, greed and selfishness. Even if you weren’t there, it’s fun to revisit the times—except when it’s not. The crashes, the greed, the waste of talent and energy, the money-grubbing snobbishness—from Woodstock up to 9/11 and a few years beyond—the last four or five decades have a lot to answer for. The story drags here and there, but at the end, you don’t want to leave Jack and his friends behind.
lets like hot rain.