Susan Gerstein's Blog

An entire year had gone by without my writing a single post, and even now I surprise myself for having a slight urge to put down some thoughts of books, of the circumstances under which they were read.

It had been a dreadful year in public life. As I indicated at the end of 2016, the political earthquake caused by the surreal election of an ignorant, vulgar, egotistic and mendacious businessman as president of the United States struck most right thinking people speechless with shock. At first one thought it was a bad dream, soon to be over; but it wasn’t. The Evil Clown and the equally horrible cast of characters surrounding him rule for the moment and change almost everything they touch for the worse. The country itself will bear the painful marks of this period – so far an entire year – for a long time to come, even if (and it is a big “if”) this shameful group gets thrown out. There is hope for that: disgust runs high, and there will be major elections at the end of 2018; perhaps a landslide win for the other side will begin to move the pendulum back in a large, sweeping arc. Perhaps. Until then, many of us wake up in the morning finding, day after day, a succubus sitting on our chest, reminding us that yes, fascism is indeed possible in the United States of America.

In the midst of this, one goes on reading. I will try to give a brief summary of the books I enjoyed, the ones that soothed me by their excellence, and the ones that emphatically did not.

To the latter group, then; all here were reviewed to great acclaim.

“The Sport of Kings” by C.E. Morgan

A huge, unwieldy saga of horseracing, southern racial relations, southern family relations that I found thoroughly unconvincing.

“Six Four” by Hideo Yokoyama

A Japanese police procedural with forays into press- and public relations, decades old family secrets, and local politics. I found it tedious beyond words, deliberately slow-moving that some reviewers found endearing but I did not. The over-subtle relationships, the sleep-inducing pace barely enabled me to finish it. In my book, not a winner.

“The Party” by Elizabeth Day

Recounted by the second-banana, just-tolerated, self-designated “best friend” of an upper-class boy/turned into ruthless businessman, the unreliable narrator, (a’la “The Talented Mr. Ripley”) attempts to maneuver himself into a power position. Once more, the melodrama overwhelms the narrative, the motivations do not ring true, and the denouement is unsatisfying.

“Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng

This was one of my biggest disappointments, not because it’s a bad book – it isn’t, it’s professionally written and tells a somewhat interesting, over-complicated story of generational conflicts, class conflicts, outcasts among the gentry – but because her previous novel, her first one, “Lies I Never Told You”, (about which I had a whole post on September 5, 2014) was such a perfect small gem that my expectations for her next one were sky high. They were not fulfilled. As so often happens, a thoroughly felt tale that needed to be told and was well reviewed and somewhat successful, is followed by a much researched, professionally written work of no major consequence.

“Manhattan Beach” by Jennifer Egan

This is my final negative comment, and by far the most unexpected. Jennifer Egan is a well known writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for her previous novel, “A Visit from the Goon Squad”; I have not read that or the preceding ones. “Manhattan Beach”, again, received entirely unanimous, rave reviews, all of which described it as a departure for her into “traditional” narrative, a tale taking place in the 1930s and 1940s, with gang life and the war years as its subject matter. Well, all that is true. It is also true that it is an unwieldy tale, a lot of which takes place in the Brooklyn Navy Yard where the main character, a child-grown-into-a-young-woman works as a diver off a destroyer. How this happens is described in endless tedious, painfully researched pages. Meanwhile, characters pop up, disappear, reappear; suddenly we are in a long section of a south Pacific boat trip; the “heroine” of the piece conducts one of the most incomprehensible love affairs I ever encountered; the gangsters take the kind of reckless chances a five year old would avoid; I could go on. And on. Let’s just say I re-read the reviews after finishing the novel, and I had to dig really deep to find anyone to agree with me; though I did, after all.

****

So, now to happier experiences.

“I Contain Multitudes” by Ed Yong

A fascinating science book about the enormous number of creatures contained in all our bodies. Most are beneficial to the point of enabling the said body to function at all; some are harmful and need to be kept in check. It introduced me to an entirely new way of thinking about our place on the planet, in the Universe. It also reminded me of the great Dr. Seuss tale “Horton Hears a Who”: the re-thinking of the very large vis-à-vis the very small.

“A Legacy of Spies” by John Le Carre

He is back! After decades – ever since the Communists demise in 1989 – of writing painfully pale copies of his earlier, brilliant novels, John Le Carre, now in his latter 80s, came up with one that would happily hold its own against his Smiley books – in fact it is, in a manner of speaking, a Smiley book. He goes back to his first great success, “The Spy Who Came In from the Cold”, and in essence writes its prequel. We get to learn what went on behind the scenes to cause the death of Leamas. Smiley is remembered as the conductor of the operation, though he does not appear until the very end – and a welcome appearance of an old friend it is. The narrative moves between the past and the present day M16 operatives, whose motives of pursuing this matter are, as usual, murky. It all comes to a near-perfect ending and gives much pleasure. Welcome back, John Le Carre.

“Dunbar” by Edward St. Auybin

Every word Edward St. Auybin writes is worth reading, he is such a master of the language. But who would have thought after reading the harrowing “Melrose” novels that the man has a sense of humor, and, far from repeatedly mining his evidently most interesting and painful young years and the difficulties of coping with growing up, he has a much larger scope and is capable of parody, and of empathy. “Dunbar” is a takeoff on “King Lear”. It is such a thoroughly satisfying version that it is hard to put down: the vaguely Murdoch-like main character and his thoroughly believable entourage are hilarious and heartbreaking in turn. A tour de force definitely worth reading.

By Penelope Lively

“How It All Begun”
“Moon Tiger”
“Passing On”
“The Photograph”
“The Road to Litchfield”
“Family Album”
“Judgement Day”
“According to Mark”


These eight novels by the British author Penelope Lively were pure delight, a welcome period of truly enjoyable reading. I had not been aware of her until I read the reviews of her most recent one, “How It All Begun” that described this writer in her eighties who had been quietly producing novel after novel about the daily lives and travails of mainly, though not exclusively, middle-class Brits coping with a changing world. It somehow sounded like a bit of Jane Austen, a bit of Barbara Pym; I plunged. And loved it so much that I went ahead with all eight books, one after another, and loved, loved every bit of it. The stories are as different from each other as one human being is from the next, that is to say, a lot; and yet they all sound the same note: life is difficult but sometimes there is hope; the dreadful is balanced by unexpected redemption, and a sense of irony goes a long way to saving the day. Highly recommended, every one.

*****

And finally I come to the two books that sent me back to the blogposts I had pretty much abandoned: Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday” and Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”. On the face of it the two have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, and the juxtaposition certainly wasn’t planned. In fact, the convergence was almost eerie, and played into my recurring themes of the merits of translation and – re-reading.

During the closing months of this year, I had “discovered” “The World of Yesterday”, a book Zweig had written in the early 1940s in Brazil where he lived in exile, a refugee from a Europe overran by the Nazis – and in fact finished only weeks before he and his wife committed suicide. The book had been in and out of print, indifferently translated; I had been aware of it, but being a great fan of Zweig’s novels, somehow his memoirs of a pre-war Europe and the headlong descent into chaos and war that followed did not make me pursue it. Now that I am so conscious of the ease with which a secure-seeming, ever-progressive world can tumble into potential – or real – chaos, I decided to give it a try. That was a good decision. The segments describing the Vienna of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period Before the War, are riveting for the usual reasons: we know what’s coming. The headlong stumbling of Europe into bloody, horrific and totally unnecessary war is viscerally depicted; and I will return to this shortly, for it has an uncanny resemblance to another, earlier war. – The post-war recovery, the brief period of hopefulness in the early thirties are described from the viewpoint of a successful, productive pan-European artist and intellectual whose world, for the second time in the short space of two decades stumbles into an abyss; this time, with the ascension of Mussolini and Hitler, it appears to Zweig, for good. He does not wait to see the outcome of the battle of good and evil; he kills himself believing the worst had won. The description of the democratically elected Fascists who destroy everything within their reach, with impunity, chilled me to the bones with its contemporary resonance.

I had read “Vanity Fair” in Hungarian when I was perhaps 13, 14 years old; and then again, in English, some thirty years ago. It became one on my mental list that “I will reread – someday”. Some day had arrived a few weeks ago, and I am delighted to be able to say that “Vanity Fair” had improved hugely over the decades! Much as I loved it before, I do so more now; the contemporaneity of it is astounding, the wry, ironic commentary on the characters is hilarious, except where genuinely touching; I found not one superfluous word in it. (Unlike some of the lately-read Dickens, where many were.)

And where the two books, “The World of Yesterday” and “ Vanity Fair” converge is the eerie segments mirroring each other in the description of a giddy, heedlessly gay mood that prevails at the declaration of war, in the one case in 1914, ushering in the First World War, in the other in 1815, the British Army preparing to confront a newly returned Napoleon at Waterloo. One could take large segments out of either book and practically insert it into the other: the expectation, the certainty of winning in a matter of the shortest period of time, almost bloodlessly of course; the visceral hatred of the enemy that only a short time before was just another neighboring country. The mute shock that comes with the discovery of the reality. One hundred years separate the events and yet it could be almost the same event. That we are now at two hundred years from one and one hundred from the other gives one occasion to think.

Looking forward to 2018; perhaps by the end of that year, I can report that the bad guys had been driven back. Fingers crossed.

So one last attempt to see out the year with a note of joy and some hope. It is not about books; as I indicated in my last post, I am deeply immersed in Anthony Powell’s “Dance to the Music of Time”, re-reading it with great pleasure, and will perhaps write about the experience sometime next year. This post has to do with two musical performances: one witnessed in person, and the other one first heard on radio and then seen on yet another technological miracle of the age: Youtube.

The first was a revival of the Metropolitan’s ten-year-old production of Verdi’s early opera Nabucco. It is a work full of melodies that are on the borderline of the bel canto style, one that Verdi was soon to abandon. It is a passionate story based on the legend of the Jewish exile in Babylon during the cruel reign of King Nebuchadnezzar, aka “Nabucco”. It has one of the most difficult soprano roles in the fictional person of Abigaille, the king’s “false” daughter and nemesis. Having seen the opera over the years several times, at first my inclination was to give it a pass this season. However, when word was out that it was to be conducted by James Levine and the baritone role of Nabucco was to be sung by Placido Domingo, one of the greatest tenors of many decades who, in his seventies, had begun to sing baritone roles, the temptation to see these two old friends pull off a potentially rousing performance proved to be too great: it promised to be an event that had to be seen.

And a most rewarding evening it had proven to be. That James Levine, 73 years old, the beloved music director of the Metropolitan for the past four decades, had been extremely ill for several years was well known; but that Placido Domingo, at the age of 76 when most singers had long stopped singing even if in excellent health, had also been through grueling illnesses recently was not known by the public generally, certainly not by me. There were, among the critics during the past couple of years, some reluctant suggestions that it was, perhaps, time to retire. Performances conducted by Levine or sung by Domingo were occasionally, gently, said to be, well, less than perfect. But neither of these musicians had shown any willingness to heed such advice; and here they both were, together as so many times in the past, putting on a show.

And what a show! James Levine, conducting from an elevated wheel-chair-like contraption, exuded all the musical energy we had associated with him in all the past years. There was not a shadow of waning powers: this was the James Levine we had known and loved for decades. Placido Domingo was, well, himself: the unmistakable tenor sound, now deepened slightly, rang out, with perhaps the slight wariness, entirely appropriate to the role, of an aging king in decline. The audience roared for both men, the ovation went on and on, for both are clearly beloved, perhaps most especially in New York where both had begun their parallel epic careers, and where both seem to be determined to end it. But not yet.

The focus, both sentimental and musical, was on Levine and Domingo. But the singers surrounding them were uniformly excellent: the Ukranian soprano Ludmilla Monastyrska was perhaps the greatest Abigaille I have ever heard, Russell Thomas’ Ismele, Jamie Barton’s Fenena, Dmitry Belloselskiy (another Ukranian) was a magnificent bass as Zaccaria. They were all simply superb, and they all clearly felt the occasion to be special. It was a privilege to be present at the event; may there be many more to come?

*

My other musical experience involves a confession, and a conversion. It is about the Bach B-Minor Mass, and it has to do with differences in the concept of the performance of a composition that can wholly change the appreciation, or lack of it, for the listener; in this instance, myself.

I have listened to classical music since childhood, and, other than opera, which is a genre all by itself, I had always tended toward chamber music, and to smaller-scale works. Large nineteenth and twentieth century symphonic music was not my first choice, and large scale choral works, while I appreciated some, did not usually make it onto the list of my personal favorites. This – here comes the confession – pertained even to Handel’s “Messiah”, which I first heard when my father took me to a concert with a chorus of hundreds singing in a huge auditorium in Budapest. I was bored and restless. The years went by and I heard many “Messiah”s, some in concert halls, some in churches, some sing-along. I fully realized that this was a great work, perhaps one of the greatest ever composed; and yet I did not warm up to it. Until one day about twenty years ago, I accidentally happened on a radio program, and heard the most heavenly music, music it took me a few minutes to identify, so different was it from what I had heard up to that point. It was the “Messiah”, performed by the Brandenburg Consort, the Chorus of King’s College, Cambridge, and conducted by Stephen Cleobury. Done on the smallest possible scale, with a chorus of some twenty singers, an orchestra of chamber proportions, and soloists right out of heaven. I was riveted, just sat and listened to the whole thing, and then I ran out and bought the CD. I have listened to it and loved it ever since. In my mind, it bears little resemblance to the versions most often heard, with an overwhelming chorus and orchestra. That might be more majestic but I prefer the intimacy and immediacy of the small; the less-is-more.

A similar experience happened to me within the past few weeks. – The Bach B-Minor Mass had been an Achilles heel of mine, an embarrassment almost. Just like the “Messiah” of my early years, I had never been able to truly love it. I am married to one of the most musically knowledgeable people I have ever met, a man who passionately loves the B-Minor Mass, and who listens to it in concerts, on CDs, wherever and whenever he can and who could never quite grasp my resistance to it. I had always known, intellectually, that this was one of the great achievements of humankind; that, when examples of such achievements, “calling cards to the Universe”, were sent into space, the score of the B-Minor Mass was included. And yet, it did not speak to me the way much other music, including other Bach compositions, did.

And then, lightening struck again. I turned on the radio the other night, and there it was, mid-performance: unmistakably the B-Minor Mass, but transformed into an intimate, delicate, contemplative sound that I found riveting. Just like before, with the “chamber” version of the Messiah, it was transformed for me into the otherworldly, transcendental sound that devotees have always heard but I did not. It was performed by the Bach Collegium of Japan, under the direction of Masaaki Suzuki. There was a chorus of perhaps 22-23 singers. The soloists were embedded in the chorus, emerged from it to sing their arias and duets and returned to their seats among the chorus. There was a small chamber orchestra, from which the instrumental soloists, again, emerged, came up front and center stage to play their part, and returned to their seats. The sound they made was, indeed, otherworldly, beautiful beyond belief. So here I am, finally, understanding what others had always known: that this is a sublime achievement; it is what makes being human possibly worth while.

After I heard this performance on the radio, I went to my computer hoping to find more information about it; and what I found was that the entire performance of the B Minor Mass by the Bach Collegium of Japan could be seen on – Youtube! So after first listening to it, I could actually watch it. The visual effects of the beautifully choreographed performance, taking place in Tokyo, in a beautiful concert hall in front of a Japanese audience, is an added bonus. That this magnificent group of musicians was mainly Japanese, with a mere sprinkling of Westerners among them and that the cultures of East and West could merge to this degree is, over and above the purely musical pleasure, perhaps a hopeful sign for the world.

As an antidote to the sadness I experienced from the recent election, I needed a diversion from current events. So here are three books that took my mind off, to some extent, of what one wants to forget.

“Razor Girl” by Carl Hiaasen

In one of his funniest sagas about life, low-life, corruption and general mayhem in Southern Florida, this is a wild ride among phony businessmen, ruthless real estate operators, Mafiosi, exotic critters, reality-TV shenanigans and much more, as the honest-cup-demoted-to-restaurant-inspector attempts to unravel a very raveled storyline. That storyline is of secondary consequence in Carl Hiaasen’s series of novels over the last thirty years: the point is the exaggerated but eminently recognizable cast of characters who are prototypes for whichever foibles of humanity he chooses to satirize. Hiaasen, who is also a journalist and columnist for The Miami Herald, has been producing these treasures of hilarity that number, by now, some fifteen novels. They have provided me with welcome amusement for many years; may he continue to produce them. “Razor Girl” is the latest one of the lot, one of the best. If you need laughter, read it.

“Mister Monkey” by Francine Prose

I had been reading Francine Prose’s articles and essays for a long time, but somehow never her novels; “Mister Monkey”, recently published, is the first one, and a wonderfully rewarding experience it has been. The book is one of those masterly balancing acts that manage to be incredibly sad and extremely funny simultaneously, breaking your heart with recognition of people you know. It is written somewhat as a series of short stories: we proceed through events with the changing viewpoints of several of the protagonists. It all begins at a dim, off-off-off-Broadway production of a children’s play, "Mister Monkey", and the sad, passed-their-prime theater people involved in it; the grandfather and grandson in the audience; the author of the book on which the play is based; an “admirer of the Theater” who happens to be a waiter in the restaurant in which an earnest young teacher is having a date from hell. They all interconnect and we are privy to their thoughts. It is about the discrepancy between early expectations and hopes and the dim achievements of middle and old age; the painful difficulties of being young, the near-hopelessness of finding reciprocated love or professional success commensurate with young ambition. Lest you should think it all too depressing, the achievement of “Mister Monkey” is that it has deep sympathy for all its characters, and that it finds the hope and the amusement in the human condition it depicts.

“Exposure” by Helen Dunmore

Once again, I encountered this newly published and well-reviewed novel by an author who had written several during the past twenty years, and yet this is the first one I had read. “Exposure” could be characterized, I suppose, as a “spy novel”, though that would not be fair to it, it is so much more than that. Taking place in the late fifties and early sixties in London, during the worst period of the Cold War and the notorious events concerning Burgess, McLean, Philby and their ilk, we are in Le Carre country. But this book is not imitation Le Carre. Helen Dunmore chooses to tell her story obliquely, her protagonists are not the main players of the drama but innocent people unwittingly caught up in it. The noose tightens around the ordinary family: the husband who inadvertently becomes a suspect and then a prisoner; the refugee wife whose secure life in law-abiding England turns on its head, and the children who have to grow up very fast to cope with an incomprehensible change in circumstances. This family is beset, on the one hand, by the real culprits who need them as scapegoats, and on the other, by the authorities who see a criminal where none exists. Meanwhile, each player in the drama has his or her own past to contend with, a past that always reaches into the present. “Exposure” is a page-turner that does not resolve until the very last page, and by then we have come to care deeply for the people we have met and rooted for.

*

And now I will do what most comforts me: return to something I have loved in the past. “Dance to the Music of Time”. Anthony Powell’s giant, twelve-volume saga of between-war and post-war England is one of the several life-changing reading experiences I have been fortunate to have; and now is a good time to disappear into it for however long a time it will take to re-meet Charles Stringham, Peter Templer, Nick Jenkins, and last but not least Widmerpool, whose career so reminds one of the rise some current politicians. Rereading these books is a promise I made to myself long ago and I am about to fulfill it.

Where to begin describing the brilliant writing of Ian McEwan? He is a rare phenomenon who not only has the detached worldview that permits him to create captivating narratives but he also manages to introduce science, philosophy, and a wry description of the world we live in, all the while using the English language as few writers can: his novels contain segments that are prose poems of devastating beauty.

His latest book, “Nutshell”, is a spellbinding tour-de-force. Narrated by the ultimate “unreliable narrator”: an unborn child regales us with a tale of crime, retribution, and so much else from inside the womb. One is taken on a rollercoaster ride of rollicking emotions, hilarious predicaments and wise observations about a world yet to be entered.

To be or not to be? That is the question. Our unborn narrator is the child of Trudy who, with her lover Claude, is planning to murder her husband, the father of the extremely observant fetus in her womb. How to thwart this crime if you have not yet been born? Is it worth the effort to be born at all? How to reconcile the love for the mother whose body holds your very existence and supplies all your needs, who contains you, with the wish to punish her (and her vile lover) for the planned crime? While contemplating this question and keeping a keen eye on the growing inevitability of the approaching evil deed, our unborn hero is increasingly observant of the world just out of his reach but clearly manifesting itself in overheard TV news, TED talks, lectures, or just plain listening to the conversations surrounding him. This is a “late” stage of his existence: he waxes nostalgic for those long-gone days what he was a mere collection of cells and had all the room to swim around in. Now he is just weeks from being born and rather tightly housed in his amniotic sac; he can’t quite make up his mind whether impending birth means a longed-for freedom, or an extremely disturbing new state of being that may not be all it’s been cranked up to be. Or not to be.

He introduces himself at the very first sentence of the book in the most eye opening way imaginable: “So here I am, upside down in a woman,” he states, and he is off on a remarkably astute description of erotic obsession, the London real estate market, and whether the general state of the planet is to be considered beyond redemption or full of hope. To be or not to be.

When I was growing up in the Hungary of the 1950s, it was a time of dreadful hardship and, simultaneously, a time of proliferating jokes, political and otherwise. Two of the non-political ones were really just two versions of an eternal verity: that there are at least two ways of looking at very nearly all situations. One was the Swiss Cheese joke, the other was the Horse Manure joke. Here they go:

After much effort, A. manages to acquire a slab of Swiss Cheese (remarkable in that food-poor period), and brings it home to his wife, beaming with pleasure. She opens the wrapping and looks at it crestfallen: It is full of holes! she complains.

Parents of twin children despair: child A is a hopeless complainer and depressive, child B is too much of a cockeyed optimist; both extremes, in the view of the parents, in need of correction. Come Christmas, they give to child A all the gifts he had asked for, while for child B they put a carefully packaged box under the tree that contains a pile of horse manure. Child A unwraps his gifts one after another: the toy train doesn’t whistle right, the book is too large, the doll is too small; he retires sulking. Child B opens his box and beams: “I got a PONY for Christmas – true, it ran away, but still. . .”

The old question: is the glass half full or half empty?

Our unborn narrator of "Nutshell" has a riff on this theme in the midst of contemplating the conflicting information he had absorbed about the state of the world he is about to enter. Here is what he had heard about it:

On the one hand:

“An expert in international relations, a reasonable woman with a rich deep voice advised me that the world was not well. She considered two common states of mind: self-pity and aggression. Each one a poor choice for individuals. In combination, for groups or nations, a noxious brew that lately intoxicated the Russians in Ukraine, as it once had their friends, the Serbs in their part of the world. We were belittled, now we will prove ourselves. Now that the Russian state was the political arm of organized crime, another war in Europe no longer inconceivable. Dust down the tank divisions for Lithuania’s southern border, for the north German plain. The same potion inflames the barbaric fringes of Islam. The cup is drained, the same cry goes up: we’ve been humiliated, we’ll be avenged. The lecturer took a dim view of our species, of which psychopaths are a constant fraction, a human constant. Armed struggle, just or not, attracts them. They help to tip local struggles into bigger conflicts. Europe, according to her, is in existential crises, fractious and weak as varieties of self-loving nationalism sip that same tasty brew. Confusion about values, the bacillus of anti-Semitism incubating, immigrant populations languishing, angry and bored. Elsewhere, everywhere, novel inequalities of wealth, the super rich a master race apart. Ingenuity deployed by states for new forms of brilliant weaponry, by global corporations to dodge taxes, by righteous banks to stuff themselves with Christmas millions. China, too big to need friends or counsel, cynically probing its neighbors’ shores, building islands of tropical sand, planning for the war it knows must come. Muslim-majority countries plagued by religious Puritanism, by sexual sickness, by smothered invention. The Middle East, fast-breeder for a possible world war. And foe-of-convenience, the United States, barely the hope of the world, guilty of torture, helpless before its sacred text conceived in an age of powdered wigs, a constitution as unchallengeable as the Koran. Its nervous population obese, fearful, tormented by inarticulate anger, contemptuous of governance, murdering sleep with every new handgun. Africa yet to learn democracy’s party trick – the peaceful transfer of power. Its children dying, thousands by the week, for want of easy things – clean water, mosquito nets, cheap drugs. Uniting and leveling all humanity, the dull old facts of altered climate, vanishing forests, creatures, and polar ice. Profitable and poisonous agriculture obliterating biological beauty. Oceans turning to weak acid. Well above the horizon, approaching fast, the ruinous tsunami of the burgeoning old, cancerous and demented, demanding care. And soon, with demographic transition, the reverse, populations in catastrophic decline. Free speech no longer free, liberal democracy no longer the obvious port of destiny, robots stealing jobs, liberty in close combat with security, socialism in disgrace, no alternatives in sight. In conclusion, she said, these disasters are the work of our twin natures. Clever and infantile. We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We were wonderful but now we are doomed.”

Thus, clearly, Not To Be.

On the other hand:

“I’ve heard enough of such talks to have learned to summon the counterarguments. Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies. And now in commentaries. Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so long-lived? When fewer die in wars and childbirth than ever before – and more knowledge, more truth by way of science, was never so available to us all? When tender sympathies – for children, animals, alien religions, unknown, distant foreigners – swell daily? When hundreds of millions have been raised from wretched subsistence? When, in the West, even the middling poor recline in armchairs, charmed by music as they steer themselves down smooth highways at four times the speed of a galloping horse? When smallpox, polio, cholera, measles, high infant mortality, illiteracy, public executions and routine state torture have been banished from many countries? Not so long ago, all these curses were everywhere. When solar panels and wind farms and nuclear energy and inventions not yet known will deliver us from the sewage of carbon dioxide, and GM crops will save us from the ravages of chemical farming and the poorest from starvation? When the worldwide migration to the cities will return vast tracts of land to wilderness, will lower birth rates, and rescue women from ignorant village patriarchs? What of commonplace miracles that would make a manual labourer the envy of Caesar Augustus: pain-free dentistry, electric light, instant contact with people we love, with the best music the world had known, with the cuisine of a dozen cultures? We’re bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who are not will be soon. As for the Russians, the same was said of Catholic Spain. We expected their armies on our beaches. Like most things, it didn’t happen. The matter was settled by some fireships and a useful storm that drove their fleet round the top of Scotland. We’ll always be troubled by how things are – that’s how it stands with the difficult gift of consciousness.”

So, perhaps, To Be after all.

Let me say – spoiler! – that the narrator, though he is unable to prevent the crime, does get his revenge in the end. A unique version of the Prince of Denmark.

All in a “Nutshell”.

After I posted my entry on “Tristan und Isolde” on October 27th in which I waxed nostalgic about the ultimate performance of that opera many decades ago and complained about the stage production of the current one, I was reminded of an omission: in the subsequent performances there were not one but two overwhelming, magnificent King Markes appearing in various opera houses, both of them Finnish: Martti Talvela and Matti Salminen.

I said nothing about them because they belong to that other, intermediate period between the legendary ’71 “Tristan” and the current one, which I sort of dismissed as of “varied quality, neither great nor uniformly poor.” During the seasons when the original stage production had been revived at the Met minus Birgit Nilsson and certainly minus any great Tristan, followed by the intermediate production in the late nineties and its several revivals, (as well as ones seen in other parts of the country and abroad), the one constant was a lack of great principals who could join forces and perform on the same high level of intensity. What I do want to describe however, are two of those performances seen during this period that were so out of balance that they literally changed the narrative of the entire opera. In both cases, several years apart, the role of King Marke, wronged husband and disappointed friend, was sung by Martti Talvela and subsequently by Matti Salminen. I forget who the Tristan and the Isolde were; I could research it, but that is not my objective. What I remember acutely are two underpowered lovers who betray the King. When the King arrives at the end of the second act to find his wife and his best friend in flagrante delicto so to speak, his majestic outpouring of grief and disappointment make him not only the tragic center of the tale but diminishes the revealed lovers to that of petulant and irresponsible youngsters. I assure you this is not the intention of the composer or the effect this scene, and the rest of the opera, is supposed to create. Both of the great Finnish bases were physically imposing and towered over the other protagonists, which only enhanced the powerful musical statement. Martti Talvela died tragically early in 1989; Matti Salminen is still singing in Europe, though he had not been back at the Met in many years. And yes, those “Tristans” in which we were fortunate enough to hear them, were memorable simply because they made them memorable, even if lopsided in some way.

But this is a subject that pertains to all opera, not only “Tristan”. We have now grown accustomed to singing actors and the days when large divas or diminutive tenors stood center stage and sang beautifully are gone. So my memory scans some of those older performances, rarer nowadays, when the same imbalances I mentioned concerning the Tristan occurred: the quality of voice or the physical appearance of the singer put an unintended spin on the storyline. I remember an “Aida” where the Aida, the enslaved Ethiopian princess beloved by the hero, was a mediocre soprano who happened to be short, heavy and white while her rival, the reining Egyptian princess rejected by the hero was not only a magnificent mezzo but also a gorgeous black woman. The love triangle became incomprehensible. A “Carmen” with phenomenal Micaela and weak Carmen? A “Gotterdammerung” where the Gutrune overwhelmed the Brunhilda vocally, or the Alberich was a more majestic presence than the Wotan? There are many examples. I am sure that everyone who goes to the opera has some. They are part of why one does go: the eternal quest for the perfect performance. They do happen. I promise.

Lest I am accused of too much grumbling, may I start by saying that the current production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”, that apex of operatic composition rarely performed to perfection, is currently in a new production at the Metropolitan Opera, and attending it this past week was a wonderful musical experience. Hellishly difficult to sing, lasting nearly five hours, needing not only five great singers but a sensitive, brilliant conductor as well, it is the crowning glory of any opera company that attempts it and succeeds. Nina Stemme, the superb Swedish soprano who had been the reigning Isolde of the last ten years had finally arrived to sing the role at the Metropolitan, and she fulfilled all expectations. Her Tristan, Stuart Skelton, an Australian tenor, was very nearly her equal. Rene Pape as King Marke, Ekaterina Gubenova as Brangene and all the supporting cast sang as expected, and Simon Rattle conducted with sensitivity. All was well on the musical side. But, alas, the staging, the production: a crushing disappointment.

Opera is not only music. If that is all it was, concert performances would be sufficient; or, for that matter, one could listen to the performance on radio, or on recordings. For those of us “groupies” who are hooked on the art form in its entirety, the theatrical aspect of it is nearly as important as the music: it is the complete performance that leaves lasting marks and that are remembered as life-changing when one is lucky enough to experience a great combination of the music and the drama. I was fortunate to have had a few of those experiences, and one of the most memorable ones was the “Tristan” during the 1971/72 season of the Metropolitan. This was an earthquake of a performance: conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, directed and designed by August Everding and Günther Schneider-Siemssen, it had Birgit Nilsson, the greatest Wagnerian singer of the second half of the 20th century singing Isolde, a role she made her debut in about ten years earlier and that earned a front-page article about the event in the New York Times. Tristan was Jess Thomas, an American tenor, excellent singer and a handsome presence; Brangene, Isolde’s confidant, was Christa Ludwig who made the role, which easily slips into the background in the hands of a lesser singer, one of the major actors in the unfolding drama; and finally, there was an excellent John Macurdy in the crucial role of King Marke.

From the very first moment when the curtain rose following the introductory music, we found ourselves in the two-tiered cutaway of the ship carrying Isolde from Ireland to Cornwall among billowing sails on the upper level and Isolde’s quarters below where the drama begins to take place, the transfixed audience was in the presence of magic. When the lovers drink the love-potion on that ship and the stage goes dark and the two of them rise to some level where they are oblivious to all and are conscious only of each other, it was magic. To the end in Kareol where Tristan lies dead and Isolde sings the final notes that consummate their love, the magic never let up. At the end of the performance, there was a pause of some seconds before the transfixed audience found its voice and roared its approval.

When it was over, there was a general feeling that it had been a once-in-a-lifetime experience; that, although one will, with luck, see more performances of “Tristan und Isolde”, they will not be able to match the quality of this one. That presentiment has proven to be true, at least for me, in the intervening 45 years. The same production survived for many years at the Metropolitan, with different people singing in subsequent seasons, none matching the original cast. There was a ridiculous new staging in 1999 that lasted several seasons, with various casts that varied in quality, never uniformly great, never uniformly poor. It disappeared several years ago.

When after a hiatus of some years the current new production was announced, the excitement among devotees of “Tristan” was immeasurable. Nina Stemme is a known quantity, a genuinely great singer, and although we knew nothing much about Stuart Skelton, hopes were high. It was only some months ago that I became aware that Mariusz Trelinsky was the proposed the director for the new production. My heart sank. I had written a post in February of 2015 about Bela Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” directed by Mr. Trelinsky and what I said about his work then was not complimentary. In short, I felt that he had either not understood the emotional underpinnings of “Bluebeard” or had intentionally misrepresented them; and that a great opportunity was missed to present a notoriously difficult-to-stage great opera. However, “Tristan” is a different work, Mr Trlelinsky has a great reputation; I decided to keep an open mind and hope against hope that that he will surprise me, and that there just might be a repeat of the transcendental experience of 45 years ago.

It was not to be. Once again, Mr. Trelinsky was determined to re-interpret a work that hardly needs re-interpretation, and introduce elements into it that not only confuse what we see but diminish the momentum that is necessary both musically and dramatically. Implications of Tristan as an arsonist? Of King Marke as a sinister presence in his past? Tristan’s death taking place in a dingy hospital room instead of the grounds of his castle in Kareol, a dark, night-time room, while he sings of harsh sunlight beating down on him? Isolde, instead of expiring in a great consummation of love, slitting her wrists and singing her transcendental final aria crumpled in a corner on stage right in the hospital room? All of the above are fatally injurious to the fundamental drama, diminish it, and in fact are contrary to the intentions of the composer. Mr. Trelinsky is an “innovator” who clearly can’t accept the operatic repertoire for what it is and feels that only drastic re-interpretation will save this, what he must consider a dying art form. To say that I violently disagree is an understatement.

Who knows? Perhaps Nina Stemme will get a great production somewhere else and I will live long enough to see it? Hope never dies. Meanwhile, there are some wonderful recordings.

Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist whose books are mainly about the changing roles of men and women in society, the toll it takes on them, and feminism and its changing character over the last several decades. She is someone whose books had been known to me only through reviews. Her writings sounded a bit tendentious; some reviews by my favorite critics were negative, so I always gave them a pass. Her latest work, “In the Darkroom”, published earlier this year, is about her reconnection with her estranged father, a Hungarian man who, at age 76, went through a sex change operation and became a woman. Or so the reviews indicated; they were mostly positive, but, once again, I felt that the subject matter, transgenderism in general and that of a 76 year old person in particular, was somewhat outside my range of interests. I had no plans to read it. However, several weeks ago, during an evening spent with an old friend, he handed me the book he had just read and assured me that I, as a Hungarian, would be interested in many aspects of it that went way beyond those described in the reviews.

Indeed, he was right. Faludi, the American born daughter of an American woman and the Hungarian Jewish father who came to the US in 1953 (four years before I did), tells the story of growing up with this volatile, fascinating but unpredictable, occasionally violent presence who disappeared from her life while she was still a teenager, only to reappear in it decades later, living on a different continent and transformed beyond recognition. She responds to his unexpected overtures and travels to Hungary where he now lives. She finds, instead of the father she remembers, a woman who contains fragments of that person in an entirely new packaging. Amazingly, they do form a bond; and the book we are reading is the result of an agreement between them: she will write his story if he will talk – preferably honestly – about his life. She begins to spend periods of time with him in Hungary; over ten years of conversations, some “snooping” into documents unwillingly supplied by him, some further research into scattered family members’ versions of events, and a lot of research into the annals of Hungarian history, produce a most interesting double story of the personal and the public events that shaped the last 80 or so years of Hungary. The personal culminates in the death of Faludi’s father toward the end of the book; she had fulfilled her promise to him and had written the memoir. But she did more than that. In the course of the alternating chapters of the book, she intersperses the personal story of this difficult, tortured man, his estrangement from not only his family but from his very identity, who feels compelled at a late age to undergo a drastic change of his most fundamental persona, with the background behind this personal saga. Her research into the whole transgender phenomenon, the nuances of the spectrum transgender people seek and/or feel comfortable with, the description of the operating facilities, in this instance in Thailand, were most informative – I learned a lot.

However, I felt that the best part of “In the Darkroom” were those interspersed chapters: her superb, concise description of Hungary’s past history and its consequential present political condition. She paints an unflattering picture of a people whose victimization by larger forces that dominated it throughout history, sometimes from the East (Tartars, Turks, Russians) and sometimes from the West (Habsburg Empire), left it with a giant chip on its shoulders which, in turn, resulted in the victimization of its own minorities, most particularly its Jews. Faludi is unerring in her description of the origins of Hungarian anti-semitism; the brief glory-period of the decades around the turn of the last century when, under the protection of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef Jews prospered, assimilated, and became more Hungarian than the Hungarians, only to face the virulent hatred that had always been there, hidden for a while but bursting forth in the 1930s. The rest is history, as the saying goes: the extermination of the vast majority of the Jewish population was achieved with the enthusiastic participation of Hungarians. Faludi’s father was the young son of an assimilated, wealthy Jewish family; they, like most everyone of their kind had been either killed or scattered: some of the survivors ended up in Israel, some in Europe, the US, or elsewhere. Faludi's story follows the history right to the present, when, after the many decades of Soviet Communist domination was lifted (together with the very demise of Communism itself), the country, after a brief promising period, fell right back to where its natural heart seems to belong: under the thumb of a right wing dictator.

And yet, one of the most puzzling aspects of the tale of Istvan/Stephan/Stephanie, Faludi, Susan’s father, is the fact that this Jewish man who lost everything as a child to the Holocaust, who fled Communist Hungary in the early 1950s to come to the US, did return in 1989 to the very place he escaped from and lived there professing to be an enthusiastic follower of the current right wing, anti-Semitic regime. And, to top it off, lived there, in a most intolerant environment, as an aging transgender person. This is where I need the novelist’s vision, since the explanation of the memoirist/journalist is opaque – by necessity, I guess.

I have been watching the giant cultural shift that had taken place in recent years away from movies toward television with as much fascination as I watch the other momentous shifts in nearly all aspects of our lives; for those of us who have been around for as long as I have, much that surrounds us is often unrecognizable.

When young, I used to be an avid lover of movies, which, at their best, were riveting and emotionally involving visual entertainment. Television was considered a mindless pastime. There were the three networks dominating the field, with a sprinkling of smaller, local stations. With the rarest of exceptions, they provided cookie-cutter sitcoms, variety shows, and news programming, always, always interrupted by the ever-present commercials. Mostly I avoided it. Then there was, starting in the early sixties, the sole alternative: WNET Channel 13, New York’s only non-commercial station, that did provide such never-to-be-forgotten programming as the “Play of the Week”, an actual taped Broadway or off-Broadway performance that was then broadcast each evening for a full week; thoughtful, intelligent talk-shows, children’s programming, art films. It was unique then, and eventually became part of the Public Broadcasting System. While it remains non-commercial to this day, it has long ceased to be the beloved local cultural forum that it had been in those early days.

This remained the general order of things until the major shift occurred: cable television made its appearance barely perceptibly. Dismissed at first by the major networks as an unimportant sideshow, it had, slowly at first, then with increasing rapidity taken over the field, upending the status quo. In the last couple of decades cable channels and streaming services became the dominant presence in providing programming, pushing the networks into the background. The pioneer in this was HBO, at its inception a provider, for a subscription fee, of relatively recent movies on the television screen in the comfort of your home, then becoming a producer of its own shows, still of no major consequence. In 1999 however, it started to broadcast the “The Sopranos” and a sort of history was made. “The Sopranos” was a new kind of “serial”: seriously written, well produced, well acted, it garnered rave reviews and an audience that swelled as the first season developed. The subject matter involved the travails of a mid-level Mafia boss, his family life, his psychological issues and his brutal “profession”. The show continued for some eight seasons, ‘til 2007, to great acclaim. I did not succumb; I still felt, -- still do in fact – that the investment of time and intellectual energy into an ongoing, multi-season saga is one I cannot afford, for in my life it is a choice between it and reading books. However, after “The Sopranos” broke ground, there were many such serial dramas developed on various cable channels, HBO continuing to produce some of what had been considered the best of them. Subscription-maintained and commercial-free, it had the luxury of developing serious projects. According to reviews, information from people in my life who are viewers, and the very few instances that I would try to sneak a look at an episode or two of something much touted, over the past decade and a half many of these series had been in fact superior to movies. Top writers, directors and actors flocked to them, and a whole culture of watching “good” television grew up around them. Then came the next development: the on-demand availability of the component episodes in a series and, therefore, the possibility of “binge watching” when one could see two, five, or all eight episodes of a season in one sitting, at a time of one’s choosing. “The Wire”, “Breaking Bad”, "Mad Men" and their ilk were supposed to be superior entertainment, sort of the current equivalent of the 19th century novels that were published serially at first and then only at the conclusion of the serial form appeared as bound books. I began to feel that I was missing something; but the only one of these high-concept shows I managed to watch for the first of its many seasons was “Game of Thrones”, about which I had written earlier – and that experience only reinforced my feeling that ultimately, I was wasting my time.

This finally brings me to “The Night Of”. Someone whose opinion I trust called me and urged me with some fervor to under no circumstances miss the eight-episode show of that title, recently concluded on HBO but available still on demand. None of my arguments prevailed: my informant pointed out that I can watch at leisure on my own time, that it is free of commercials, that it is a one-season event, that it will not go on indefinitely, (one of my usual objections), and that missing it I would miss something shattering and brilliant. I succumbed. Last week I freed up enough time to see first two, then three, and again three segments. I can only say that I am deeply grateful to my informant. This is a show I would urge anyone interested in film, in any version of it, to see. On the face of it, it is a police procedural, but that is like saying that “The Magic Mountain” is a hospital drama. Written by Richard Price whose superb novels, in a similar vein, transcend the genre, directed by Steven Zaillian and acted with uniform brilliance by a large group of actors each of whose characters will long haunt me. John Turturro, Riz Ahmed, Bill Camp, Jeannie Berlin, Michael Kenneth Williams to name only a few of the large cast kept me riveted from the first frame to the last fadeout. I understood how the leisure afforded to the creators of the show by the eight hours they had at their disposal to tell their tale made it a different, perhaps better way of telling it than the usual two, perhaps three hours of a traditional film. It did indeed come close to the experience of reading.

I don’t believe that I am converted to watching lengthy, protracted serial shows on television in principle, but I am extremely glad I saw this one. I would be the poorer to have missed it. I would as enthusiastically persuade anyone I cared about to see it as my personal expert was in persuading me, and I am grateful to her.

In May of 2013, nearly three and a half years ago, I wrote a post about a most interesting reading experience: on how I found, via the unlikely medium of television, the series of fantasy books by George R.R. Martin, collectively called “A Song of Ice and Fire”. As I then described, prior to my discovery of the books, a television series was created based on them; in fact it was that show, “Game of Thrones”, (the title on the first volume of the saga) that led me to the books. At that time five volumes of a planned seven existed. The TV show based on the first volume was wildly successful and a second season based on the second volume was being planned. The show was indeed well done, but, as I said at the time, having commenced to read them, the books were far more detailed, in fact far more interesting; I continued to watch the show periodically for a while, merely as an interesting illustration of the rather unique, phantasmagorical story; and soon stopped. I read three of the existing volumes – and then I forbore reading the fourth and fifth ones, for the author by then was deeply involved in the ongoing television project and I did not trust him to finish the saga. He had been extremely slow in producing it so far; it took him from 1991 to 2011 to produce the five existing volumes. Fans had been clamoring for the final ones; one very much wanted to know how will the denouement be pulled off? But investing the time needed to read on – these are all hefty volumes – would be pointless if we were never going to come to a satisfying end. Meanwhile, it was reported that the TV show was plunging ahead: season followed season, for a while in parallel with the books: successive seasons hued closely to the successive volumes, though taking increasing liberties with them.

My lack of trust proved entirely correct.

Television overtook writing. There was no more talk of the final volumes ever appearing on the horizon: George RR Martin, too slow a writer to satisfy the TV industry, had been left behind and the final seasons, upcoming, will be on their own. While I imagine the author is probably somewhat involved with the ending of his own saga, it would likely be in a mere advisory role, while a committee of screenwriters produce the much awaited answer to the question posed in the long ago first volume: Is Winter Coming?

I had long ago stopped watching the TV series, which became ever more violent and gratuitously sexual. Until quite recently, I kept hoping for those final two volumes to somehow, miraculously, materialize. But I have now given up and accepted television’s victory over printed matter, at least in this instance.

“A Song of Ice and Fire” never was great literature, but it was a riveting story well enough written to hold one’s attention through hundreds, eventually thousands of pages. I find it extremely regrettable that it was abandoned two thirds of the way through and handed over to what eventually became an overheated TV series. Whereas I didn’t begrudge the time it took to read those first three volumes, I would most decidedly begrudge the time required to watch endless episodes of such a story on television. So I suppose I will never really know whether Winter Came.

There must be thousands of volumes published, PhD theses hidden in University libraries, seminars conducted, on the subject of a glaring omission in Victorian novels of the one taboo subject: sex. There are multitudes of these beloved nineteenth century novels, some slight, some huge and spilling into many volumes, some charming, some thought provoking, some heart-rending. Many contain versions of the eternal verities. The relationships among the characters, their inner lives, their shifting power positions vis-à-vis each other are minutely described. The Marriage Plot abounds: many of the novels are about what happens behind the closed doors, i.e. sex. And yet, there is never, never any overt reference to it: danced around, alluded to, winked at – but not spoken of in direct terms.

Not being a scholar myself, merely a devoted reader of Thackeray, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Trollope and company, I have always accepted this as a given. The occasional scholarly article I encountered here and there would give explanations, mostly the obvious one of Victorian repression – and by Victorian an entire era is alluded to that includes the pre-Victorian decades as well as its immediate Edwardian coda – and I was perfectly willing to leave it at that. One knows that while the serious authors would not touch the subject with a bargepole, there was extensive consumption of erotica; the two genres simply existed in utterly separated spheres. It is understood that there was a literary underground, and that “gentlemen” of the period could and would easily obtain extremely kinky erotic literature – one wonders how many women did – and yet none of it ever spilled over into the work of respected writers.

I came to muse about this while being deeply immersed in the Palliser books of Anthony Trollope. These six immense volumes of interconnected novels, as well as the stand-alone “The Way We Live Now” somehow beg the question: what did happen behind those closed doors? One does not ask this question while reading Jane Austen, where the occasional extra-marital sexual relationship does occur (and is usually severely punished), but the plotlines are so clearly about innocence triumphant and are constructed with such flawless perfection that it would be improper to even consider what might have happened between Lydia Bennett and Wickham, or Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford after they ran off together. But some clearer allusion to the disastrous marriage of Dorothea Brooke and The Reverend Casaubon in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” might clarify the relationship beyond the intellectual incompatibility. Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd” fairly cries out for some allusion of what had actually happened between the protagonists. In the very first Palliser novel, “Can You Forgive Her”, the character of George Vavasor and his role in Alice Vavasor’s life would be much clearer if his shady relationships with -- we can only guess – a prostitute or two were described in less oblique terms. One would love to know a little more of the intimate lives of Lady Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser, or of the physical abhorrence that must have been at least one of the reasons for the breakup of the dreadful marriage of Lady Laura Standish and Robert Kennedy. The marriage market calls for all sorts of prices to be paid, in and out of bed; but we never learn of the part that takes place in bed. It is all very well when the object of the novel is to take a dewy young girl and an upstanding young man across obstacles to the altar; but in novels that take us beyond that moment into real life, a little more information could be useful. Not that I am complaining; I find the nineteenth century novels, the Trollope ones in particular since I am presently enveloped in them, a wonderful way to enter a different world, and perhaps the veil they keep over the most private aspects of their characters’ lives are part of the delight.

In fact I am thinking how this taboo about sex had lasted well into the thirties, forties, fifties of the twentieth century, less in literature than in movies. I remember both reading and seeing “Gone With the Wind” and being shocked when Rhett carries Scarlett up the staircase in a scene that implies ravishment and stops at the bedroom door. The furthest we got before the rules were abandoned and liberation from taboos had taken place by the middle of the twentieth century was a passionate kiss. Perhaps it was better that way?