Bedouin Hornbook

From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate #1

by Nathaniel Mackey

novel, volume 1 of FROM A BROKEN BOTTLE, TRACES...

Genres: Fiction, Music, Novels, Poetry

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida. He received a BA degree from Princeton University and a PhD from Stanford University.

Nathaniel Mackey has received numerous awards including a Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. Mackey currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Namesake Epigraph #7:
"In modern opera, music is not merely a means of heightening, ennobling verbal language—it is not there to make the words more eloquent, so to speak; it is deliberately contrasted with the words, placed behind the words, making them transparent so that you can see their second inner significance...The music does not achieve this by 'heightening' the words but by opening an abyss of meaning and countermeaning behind them."

This is the heady, hard critical-theory-poetic GAN about Jazz that you never knew existed. Though it is certainly a "jazz novel," it resists and undoes the improvisatory/experimental elements that "Jazz Fiction" is typically known for, replacing them instead with an interior context-based logic of progression; or, as Mackey would have it: it breaks out of the dialectic of is/isn't and instead acts as a digestion of the Jazz novel, is informed by the jazz novel, but is chemically and intellectually altered into something entirely its own. I often thought of Borges in his preface to the reissue of Ficciones:

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

This is that summary/commentary/deferment-to-already-existence, but about large bodies of challenging music and musical performance, not books. It is interesting to note (and somewhat unbelievable) that Mackey himself is not a musician, but rather an avid listener.

The blur/tension/play between the above Borges quote and the epigraph which began this review should start to give you an idea of what you're in for. One of the densest and most unique books I have ever read—you will never know where it is you will go, but it will make you marvel at how something so breathtakingly smart and unexpected can dwindle still in the unknown corner of American literature while STILL BEING IN PRINT.

[Graham P · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel about an artist finding a voice in the intellectual hotmess between passion and pretension, this first entry in the Mackey universe totally reversed all expectations. It's a love letter full of itself, as important a book about the artist against their art, and a love letter that becomes a mixtape where all songs lead the listener back to themselves, leaning in lone shadow, playing jazz records as if conversing with gods both forgotten and still undiscovered. Dolphy, Trane, Sam Rivers and Sun Ra, and other legendary misfits of soul and sound - this is what the American form of Jazz was meant to be: illuminating, misunderstood, verbose and egotistical, passionate and complex.

That last chapter of Djamilaa breaks my heart.

[Ashon · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book taught me how to think about music/ality. it is simply marvelous.

[Seth Shimelfarb-Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest books ever written. It made me question my own romanticized adoration of the bass clarinet. Lambert reminds me of someone I know.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cerebral as the dickens, with a freewheeling approach that ties together myth with etymology and prophetic vision with carnal spasm. I appreciate the way he sees beyond appearances into the essence of things. My favorite scene was the elaborate debate between strangers that happens on a street in San Francisco in response to this graffito: "Mr. Slick and Mister Brother are one of the two most baddest dude in town, and Sutter Street."

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

As much a primer on all the rad experimental/mystical/jazz music the indie rocker kids are missing out on as a novel.

[Gaius · Rating 5 out of 5]

clearly a work of unremitting genius; still, a book can't say I'd readily recommend. If you are interested in music, myth, mysticism - the alchemical web between the three - this is up your alley. I think an advanced interest in Jazz would also enhance your experience significantly. Ultimately, though, this book is for all, and I hope everyone reads it. Obscenely underrated.