“Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAR 20, 2014)

The protagonist of Orfeo, Peter Els, listens at age thirteen to a recording of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony and is transported. This novel continues the author’s literary exploration of cutting edge science and its impact on its practitioners. Peter Els becomes a composer of serious music, very much of the current moment in the arts. He is a musical idealist, with a belief in the power of music to truly move the listener. As he matures, his work becomes ever more difficult and timely. As a young man he was a prodigy in music with talent in science as well. The creative juices of both flow in his veins. In college he starts out in chemistry, but becomes enmeshed in music through the musical connection with his first love, Clara. In graduate school at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, his work becomes ever more difficult and “modern,” in part through his collaborations with Maddy, who becomes his lover and later his wife for a while, and with Richard Bonner, an experimental theater director who he meets while in graduate school. Richard pushes him to become ever more radical.

Peter teaches music at a small university for some years, but retires fairly young and returns to chemistry, taking up biohacking as a hobby, encoding music into the DNA of the serrata marcescens bacterium. Peter chooses it because of its ubiquity in scientific research and ready availability despite the fact that it can cause illness. On the surface, this might seem like an implausible fantasy to write art onto DNA, but Joe Davis, an artist, in Cambridge, MA, hijacked the expertise of molecular biologists at Harvard and MIT more than 30 years ago to modify the DNA of e-coli to encode a bitmapped image as well as the decoding scheme onto areas of that organism’s “junk” DNA. Through a Kafkaesque series of happenstance Peter becomes pursued by the authorities who are concerned that Peter might be a bio-terrorist.

Orfeo is literary science fiction of the highest order. It is not about the future, but rather takes the cutting edge of contemporary science and makes it part and parcel of the novel. Among other things it is also a learned and passionate discourse on western music as it has developed over time to the present with an emphasis on more recent work. Powers’ description of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony is remarkable. My composer father wanted to name me Jupiter because the Jupiter Symphony was, in his opinion, the greatest symphony of all time. I’ve listened to it many times and find it quite wonderful, but I do not have the musical vocabulary to really appreciate its depth. Powers’ description of Peter Els listening to it for the first time showed me why my father felt so strongly. The poignant and elegiac description of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is wonderful poetic history. It is a piece that I’ve enjoyed many times and one whose history was familiar to me as well. Powers’ sympathetic appreciation of music is admirable.

I’m familiar with much of the contemporary music he describes and as far as I can see, the details, historical and artistic, are correct. The composers, old and new are as described. Powers gets his science right as well. The writing is brilliant, not dumbed down in any way, and evocative as all get out. I recommend this novel and author without reservation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (January 20, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Richard Powers
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Generosity: An Enhancement The Echo Maker

Bibliography:

• Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)
• Prisoner’s Dilemma
• The Gold Bug Variations (1991)
• Operation Wandering Soul (1993)
• Galatea 2.2 (1995)
• Gain (1998)
• Plowing the Dark (2000)
• The Time of Our Singing (2003)
• The Echo Maker (2006)
• Generosity: An Enhancement (2009)
• Orfeo (January 2014)

“It is the feeling that your life has just left the room.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (SEP 6, 2011)

Nabokov stated in the first page of his 1961 memoir, Speak Memory, “…our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” In Diana Spiotta’s new novel, Stone Arabia, eccentric narcissist, obsessive archivist and iconoclastic musician Nik Kranis mines that fleeting fissure of light and warns his sister, Denise, “Self-curate or disappear.”

This nostalgic and affecting story of siblings (and family) is a philosophical meditation on memory and the driven desire for autobiography–to document and render a consequential life, and to assemble disparate experiences into coherent narratives. “And even then,” says Denise, “the backward glance is distorted by the lens of the present…It is not just that emotions distort memory. It is that memory distorts memory.”

At the vortex of this novel is fifty-year-old Nik Kranis, aka his alter ego, Nik Worth, a pre-punk, no-hit wonder, LA musician, whose band The Fakes almost made it twenty years ago. “Nik had the sensibility down. And Nik had the look down. He was born to look pasty and skinny and angular.” But a combination of self-sabotage and solipsism undermined commercial success, and he alternately constructed a legendary career in music via his manufactured narrative, “The Chronicles.” Stretching back from 1973-2004, “The Chronicles” is a thirty-volume reinvention of a life, a daily scrapbook and fictionalized biography of Nik Worth, platinum rock star. It is a career arc so detailed and spectacular that it would rival Dylan’s.

Included in “The Chronicles is every band Nik was ever in, every record he ever made, and his solo career, recorded via his twenty-volume “Ontology of Worth.” We also get liner notes, reviews (sometimes highly critical and damning, all created from Nik’s imagination), obits of former band members, and detailed artwork for every cover. Nik is what we would call a legend in his own mind. We depend on Denise’s shifting narrative modes to trace the authentic Nik, a hermetic, aging, chain-smoking, alcoholic mooch who is blasé about his present decay and his future prospects. “He pursued a lifetime of abuse that could only come from a warped relationship with the future.” But even Denise is hooked on Nik’s worth as a musician.

The story is narrated largely through Denise’s point-of-view, which shifts back and forth from first to third person, and is conveyed like the 80’s eclectic music scene, mash-up style, that fans of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad will appreciate. She’s the slightly younger sister and caretaker of the family, and Nik’s biggest fan. However, Denise is concerned with exact recall, and is writing “The “Counterchronicles” as counterpoint to Nik’s mythical biography, to earnestly document an accurate record of recent events. Besides Nik, her life orbits around her daughter, Ada, a documentary filmmaker who wants Nik as her next subject; a tepid relationship with boyfriend, Jay, who she sees every two weeks for sex and old movies; and a mother who is suffering from early dementia. Denise is frightened of her own memory loss, convinced that it is imminent and inevitable.

Trebly and anxious, Denise panics vicariously through sordid and tragic news events. External though they are, they penetrate her personal boundaries, leak inside and cause ongoing existential crises. SARS, Abu Ghraib, and a celebrity murder-suicide are but a few of the terrors that invade Denise’s psyche. Moreover, Denise and Nik are enmeshed to a degree that “My sister doesn’t count as my audience because she feels like an extension of me. She’s, well, an alternative version of me.”

Spiotta’s creamy prose is abundant with quotable lines and arch aphorisms. There isn’t much of a plot, but the story is powerful and vibrant, laced with mordant, electric riffs and visceral, melancholy chords.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 38 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner; First Edition edition (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dana Spiotta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Bibliography:

• Lightning Field (2001)
• Eat the Document (2006)
• Stone Arabia (2011)

“Frozen with fear and anxiety, he felt lost, displaced, and without any idea of what to do next. It was inconceivable. The perfect, organized, meticulously planned Charlie Giles might be the most out-of-control beast imaginable.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowksy  (JUN 25, 2011)

Daniel Palmer’s Delirious is a nightmarish tale in which Charlie Giles, “an electronics superstar,” suddenly loses his job, his reputation, and quite possibly, his mind. Charlie is no stranger to mental illness. His father was schizophrenic and his older brother, Joe, also suffers from the disease. Their mother has devoted her life to helping Joe become more stable, but Charlie has carefully distanced himself from his family and his past. He is a workaholic who made a small fortune from the sale of his start-up company, and is still putting in long hours to earn more money and accolades. One day, everything comes crashing down and he has no idea why. It seems as if he is committing a series of crimes, but he has no memory of having done anything wrong.

This plot, although familiar, works surprising well because Palmer fleshes out his characters and inserts realistic details into the story. The stage is set when we observe Charlie, who cares for his dog more than anyone else, pushing his employees mercilessly. He is a control freak who avoids feeling such “messy emotions” as compassion, empathy, and forgiveness. He prides himself on inspiring fear in his team; he believes that if his workers are anxious, they will produce at a higher level. Soon, the shoe will be on the other foot. Not only will Charlie learn what it is like to be stressed out, but he will also become all too familiar with panic and hysteria. Adding to Charlie’s burdens are serious health issues affecting his mother and brother. For the first time, Charlie sees Joe as a good and valuable person in his own right who deserves love and respect.

Palmer keeps the adrenaline rush going for close to four hundred pages. He masterfully describes Charlie’s horrible mental decline. Should he trust his senses or accept the evidence that condemns him? The author’s familiarity with computer software and music come in handy, since Palmer finds ingenious ways of integrating this knowledge seamlessly into the narrative. The roller coaster ride finally stops when we reach the shocking revelations and final confrontation. Although the ending is implausible in a mind-boggling way, strangely enough, it does not completely detract from the book’s entertainment value. Delirious is an exciting, mind-bending, and suspenseful thriller that explores the dangers inherent in our digital world; the crucial role that family plays in our psychological development; and the ways in which connecting with others helps us realize our full potential as human beings.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Kensington; 1 edition (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Daniel Palmer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk by David Ambrose

Bibliography:

• Delirious (February 2011)

“Thinking back, he is surprised at the quantity of time he spent in daydreams. His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense. It never occurred to him to consider that the greatest portion of his spirit might have been poured into this creation. But it is not a despairing conclusion. His daydreams were a life’s endeavor of sorts, and now, when everything else is cast off, they are still at hand.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (Mar 6, 2011)

How do you write about failure?

Early in this book, its protagonist, Ulrich, a young Bulgarian man studying chemistry in Berlin, is walking down a corridor after Albert Einstein, who drops a sheaf of papers. When he picks them up and runs after the great man, Einstein thanks him by saying “I would be nothing without you.” Much later in life, after his own career has been a failure by all outward measures, and life has almost been crushed out of him by Soviet austerity, Ulrich comes to learn more about Einstein and his callousness to some of those closest to him, and realizes that genius feeds off the failure of others. “The people close to him were blocked up and cut off. Their lives were subdued, and they were prevented from doing what they hoped to do. […] How many stopped-up men and women does it take to produce one Einstein?” Ulrich realizes that when Einstein spoke those words, “it was not success he saw written in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything at all.”

I suspect that this insight might have been the genesis of this daring novel. How might it have been for a non-Einstein, a scientist forced to abandon his studies, a musician without a violin, a human being neutered by a grey regime? What might he have had to offer the world other than dreams? Seeing that Dasgupta gives his novel a musical title, and calls its two parts “movements,” I also suspect that his musical inspiration might have been Bela Bartok’s “Two Portraits for Violin and Orchestra” of 1908. This is a two-movement composition reworking the same material in two contrasted ways, the first elegiac and slow, and the second frenetic and distorted. This is exactly the structure of Dasgupta’s novel: a first part about a life lived in shades of grey, followed by a second dream-life in strident color.

The concept is daring because it deals with mediocrity and failure in a strikingly bipolar way. But Dasgupta’s ideas require him to generate enough momentum to keep one reading through the Slavic gloom of Ulrich’s deterioration in the first part and present the second as a convincing and relevant reworking of the material. Unfortunately, in order to emphasize the contrast between the two “movements,” the author shoots himself in the foot. The second part, despite a certain flashy vulgarity, is not uninteresting, but you have to get through the first part in order to reach it — 160 pages devoid of music, poetry, or inner beauty. For instance, we first see Ulrich as a young boy fascinated with music. His mother buys him a violin, but when his father returns from a business trip some months later, he throws the instrument into the fire. This happens on page 18, and from then on there is virtually no music in the first part of the book — not even in the writing, which is dry and declarative almost throughout: this happened; then that happened; then something else.

Ulrich transfers his interests to chemistry. He gets to study in Berlin, but has to abandon his degree when his parents lose their money. Back in Sofia, he works as a clerk, then as the manager of a chemical factory charged with impossible goals in each successive Five Year Plan. His romantic life fizzles out in failure. Now retired, blind, poor, and nearing 100, all he has are the daydreams which form his legacy. Or so we are told. The first part ends with the quotation I offer above, but this is the first we hear of any daydreams at all. By depriving Ulrich of any inner life in the first part, Dasgupta sets up his contrast all right, but he deprives the reader also.

Ulrich’s daydreams make up the second movement, and they restore at least some of the music that had vanished so completely earlier. But it is a savage music, a grotesque scherzo. It begins almost as a series of short stories: a near-feral boy playing on an old fiddle in an abandoned factory, the beautiful but impoverished daughter of a former princess who marries a Georgian gangster and takes on much of his ruthlessness, and an American record producer credited with the invention of world music as a popular genre. Eventually, these strands interweave. Dasgupta has gifts as a storyteller, and there is a color, an energy, a wild poetry here that the first part lacks. But he is a self-conscious writer who now seems determined to bring in all the hues he had previously denied. His moments of ecstasy go over the top, and there is too much reliance on drugs, alcohol, and sex. None of these characters is entirely likeable, and this second part also reflects the wanton hardness, squandering of resources, and disregard for humanity that made the first part so distasteful. Yet at least this preserves an element of truth in the fun-house mirror, in a way a more sentimental ending might not.

Nonetheless, this novel about a mediocrity is by no means mediocre itself. It is an original concept that might work for other readers. So let’s end with Ulrich passing his legacy to Boris, the dream alter-ego whose violin playing has rocketed him to stardom: “I have a lot of failure to give away. Look at my music: a fantastic failure. A triumphant failure. That’s the legacy I leave behind. If I could make an Einstein with my failed science, think what will come of my music!”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rana Dasgupta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More music melded with literature: An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

Bibliography:

• Tokyo Cancelled (2005)
• Solo (2009; February 2011 in US)  Commonwealth Prize

“Jessold was an embarrassment. His name became proverbial, signifying a kind of artistic dementia, a byword for murderous obsession: the same fate Gesualdo had suffered. The works, best dismissed on grounds of taste, were completely unrevivable. These were his missing years, not in life but in death. Nothing of the real man (the charismatic, genius Jessold) survived: only the cartoon, the caricature, the parody, the deluded monster.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (FEB 4, 2011)

Wesley Stace’s ample new novel — half murder mystery, half music criticism — opens with a press report on the death of the talented young English composer Charles Jessold in 1923. He appears to have shot himself in his apartment after poisoning his wife and his wife’s lover and watching them die. The murder-suicide has not one but two ironic precedents. It reproduces the story of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, who similarly killed his wife with her lover. It is also the subject of an English folk-ballad, “Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave,” which Jessold had taken as the subject for his operatic magnum opus, due to premiere the following night. Given the circumstances, the opera was canceled and Jessold’s posthumous reputation ruined. It seems clear that he was a man obsessed by the career of Gesualdo, his near-namesake, as he squandered his own talent in alcoholism and excess. The facts are not in dispute; it only remains to trace the sorry path that led to this debacle, and ascertain the composer’s possible motives.

This task is left to Leslie Shepherd, a gentleman of independent means who writes musical criticism for a leading London paper. Meeting Jessold at a country-house weekend, he takes it upon himself to promote the young man and guide his early career. It is the period of the English folk-song revival, when composers such as Vaughan-Williams and Holst would go out into the countryside to transcribe ancient versions of the old ballads as sung by aged countrymen, in search of a home-grown nationalism to combat the dominance of German music. Jessold is staying with Shepherd and his wife Miriam when they hear the “Little Mossgrave” ballad (sic) sung by an old sheep-shearer, planting the seed for the eventual opera, for which Shepherd will write at least the first draft of the libretto. But a decade must pass before that. Jessold attracts attention with a number of smaller compositions; he makes two trips to study in Germany, but is trapped there by the outbreak of the 1914 war, and
spends the next four years in an internment camp. There, he manages to write music of ever greater brilliance, and returns to London in 1918 as a musical celebrity and clearly the next great hope for British music. But he also becomes personally unreliable, rejecting his old friends, and turning to drink.

Wesley Stace is clearly a musician; in fact he has a separate career as a singer-songwriter under the name John Wesley Harding. But he knows the classical repertoire too. Unlike virtually all novels about musicians that I have read (Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music being the sole other exception), the musical background to this one is impeccable. Stace understands the conflict in prewar British music between pastoral Englishism and dilettantish daring. He is also aware of the great movements on the continent; he has superb passages on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and especially Schoenberg’s second string quartet, the work in which he renounced tonality. Shepherd sums up his experience of the latter: “Yet I had to admit that I too felt the wonder of the music, its power, its horror. I had laughed at Jessold’s ‘breeze from other planets,’  but I had experienced it, that chill wind blowing from the future, in the hairs on the back of my neck, in my soul.” Stace is brilliant at showing how Jessold steered his way between these various influences. He makes the composer always plausible, but very much his own man. If there is any one composer whose early music one thinks of more than others, it is Benjamin Britten, and the 1945 premiere of Britten’s Peter Grimes is another of the brilliant musical set-pieces in the book.

I do have problems, however. There are many times when I am not sure whether the music is just the background to the personal story, or whether the story has been devised solely to enable Stace to write about the music. As a musician myself (including as an opera librettist and former critic!), I was fascinated by everything, but other readers might find the book slow. Stace also goes out of his way to imitate the mandarin style of a lot of English writing at the beginning of the century, flowing with the stately amplitude of a Henry James, and there are times when you just wish he would get on with it. This is especially so in the second part of the book, after Jessold is long since dead, and Stace continues into the later years of his biographer, Leslie Shepherd. The musical details continue to fascinate, but when Hamlet has left the scene, who is interested in Horatio? Yet stick with it while Stace goes through the same events again but from an intiguingly different perspective. Some of his surprises come close to narrative cheating, but in the end they transform the book into a different kind of psychological study altogether, still very much worth the reading.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wesley Stace
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Charles Jessold website
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More music in fiction: Paganini’s Ghost by Paul Adams Blue Duets by Kathleen Wall

Bibliography:

• Misfortune (2005)
• By George (2007)
• Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer by Wesley Stace (February 2011)

“Yevgeny passed the violin back to me. I held the instrument up and studied it carefully from all sides. My fingers were trembling slightly, my heart fluttering. Il Cannone had been Paganini’s violin for nearly forty years. It was with him throughout his entire mature career, through all the triumphs as he set Italy, and then Europe, ablaze with his dazzling virtuosity. There was history in this violin. What tales it could tell, I thought, if it had a human voice, instead of just a musical one.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose  (JAN 05, 2011)

Cremona, Italy. On the eve of an important performance, local luthier Gianni Castiglione is called on to examine Il Cannone, the violin once played by Niccolò Paganini, which would be played that night by competition winner Yevgeny Ivanov. A minor adjustment is made and at the recital both violin and musician perform flawlessly. The next day, however, a concert attendee, a French art dealer, is found dead in his Cremona hotel. Two items are noted among his possessions: a locked golden box and a torn corner of a music score from the night’s previous performance. Gianni’s police detective friend, Antonio Guastafeste, enlists his help and the two soon find themselves on an international chase, on the trail of not just a murderer but of a priceless historical treasure, one worth killing for.

Gianni, appearing in author Paul Adam’s well-received The Rainaldi Quartet (2007), is a warmly sympathetic character and a compelling, often philosophical narrator. All the characters are well developed, giving the story a depth and sense of humanity not always found in mysteries and thrillers. Classical music lore and historical detail spring to life, as do descriptions of Paris, London and the Italian countryside. A side plot in which Gianni befriends Yevgeny Ivanov is charming and effective and deepens the mystery—might Yevgeny or his overbearing stage mother be involved in the nefarious goings-on? The story offers the reader insight into the life of a young career musician, the grind of it, the competitions, the grueling performance schedule. As well, a romantic angle to the story helps flesh it out—Gianni’s developing relationship with Margherita Severini, his musings over his first wife who died several years earlier, both of which are presented with a warm, realistic touch.

Paganini’s Ghost is sure to appeal to the music history reader who normally doesn’t “do” mysteries, as well as providing a palatable dose of history to readers who tend to gloss over “those boring details” to get to the action. Adam has a great eye for detail, is economical with his words, uses humor sparingly, which makes it all the more entertaining and delightful when it does appear. Some passages are worth reading and rereading for their subtle artistry, such as the following, which I found myself reading aloud to anyone who would listen:

“He was a short, goatlike man with crooked, slightly buck teeth, a shock of untidy grey hair, and a covering of pale fluff on his chin that was too insubstantial to warrant the term beard. He gave the impression of good-natured affability, until you looked into his eyes. His eyes were cold and cloudy, like chips of frosted glass.”

No, this is not searing, literary fiction that will forever haunt you. It is not high stakes, high-octane thriller writing. It’s better: an engrossing, intelligent, satisfying page-turner I’d recommend to almost anyone, and a “you’ve got to read this” to music history or classical music fans. A great follow-up to The Rainaldi Quartet. This is book two in the series; here’s hoping we will see much more of Gianni and Guastafeste.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Felony & Mayhem (December 16, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paul Adam
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:The Rainaldi Quartet

Bibliography:

• An Exceptional Corpse (1993)
• A Nasty Dose of Death (1994)
• Toxin (1995)
• Unholy Trinity (1999)
• Shadow Chasers (2000)
• Genesis II (2001)
• Flash Point (2003: March 2004 in US)
• Enemy Within (2005)
• Oracle Lake (July 2007)

Gianni Castiglione and Antonio Guastafeste series:

• The Rainaldi Quartet (2004;February 2006 in US) (Called Sleeper in the U.K.)
• Paganini’s Ghost (January 2010)

Max Cassidy Series:

• Escape from Shadow Island (February 2010)

“Dear Robert,
Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake. Are you in pain or feeling alone? You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist…”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (JAN 3, 2011)

There are a handful of writers who haunt me. That is, as I’m reading their books they come to me in my dreams, usually with sharp elbows and voices clamoring for attention. Cormac McCarthy effects me this way. So does, not surprisingly perhaps, Friedrich Nietzsche. No writers whisper to me in my dreams. It was the second night of reading Just Kids that I discovered here too a voice so strong and compelling so as to ring in my ears after the book is closed, the eyes shut and the brain turned off. Like caffeine, if consumed after a certain late hour, you know you’re in for a ride. Patti Smith is an original. She is a poet with the heart of a rock star and the drive of an Olympic athlete. She comes at you hard and fast and won’t let go, even in a dream state. She is that mesmerizingly good.

I was unsure what to expect with Just Kids. It won the National Book Award, so I knew it was deemed good, but I didn’t know why. Nor did I know much about the lives it depicted, principally the lives of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. I knew of them, but little else. As a photographer I was certainly familiar with Mapplethorpe’s work, much of it brutal and stark, but the life behind the work was a simple ghost. Of Patti, my slate was almost clean.

It didn’t matter. I didn’t have to know anything. I was in deep from the first paragraph and who what and where were abstract concepts. “I was asleep when he died,” begins the foreword. “I had called the hospital to say one more good night, but he had gone under, beneath layers of morphine. I held the receiver and listened to his labored breathing through the phone, knowing I would never hear him again.”

What follows is the story of two young kids, Patti and Robert, both born in 1946, who discover each other, their art and the world, amongst the bohemians of New York. Each is a springboard-muse to the other. They are lovers, adventurers, soul mates, room mates and, perhaps most importantly, friends in the truest sense of the word. “We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad.” She continues: “Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”

Patti’s world ranged from poetry to visual art to music–a blending of disciplines. Here she traces her effort to find her voice, struggling to release the artist within. As a bookstore clerk, she finds herself in a bar sitting among Janis Joplin, Grace Slick and Jimi Hendrix. She writes that she found an “inexplicable sense of kinship with these people.” Her’s is a story of innocence, of trying on a voice like an article of clothing, to see how it fits. In her slight modesty, she lacks the ambition that Mapplethorpe wears like a battlefield suit of armor. It is 1969 and the world is roiling with ambition, with change and excitement.

Mapplethorpe is rendered here with a quiet, yet graceful, painfulness–his need for fame and personal release is so powerful. His artist soul is struggling for expression, his homoerotic self is breaking its bonds. Heartbreakingly, we hear of Patti alone in their Chelsea hotel while Mapplethorpe walks the streets fueled by the excitement of random male encounters. “I begged him not to go,” she writes, “but he was determined to try. My tears did not stop him, so I sat and watched him dress for the night ahead. I imagined him standing on a corner, flushed with excitement, offering himself to a stranger, to make money for us.” Artistically, she watches him break into Warhol’s inner circle, an individual Patti viewed with suspicion. The grace with which she renders the transitions in their relationship, of which there are many, is evidence to the unquestioning bond between them. Later, she would say of Mapplethorpe’s images, “His pursuits were too hard core for me and he often did work that shocked me….I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality.”

Just Kids has a tone of the elegiac about it. It stops short of heightened fame, of notoriety, of sadness. Instead it sings of a time of innocence when the world was being created anew and artists lead in the struggle. It was a time when a couple of young kids from parts unknown could–and did–create themselves from whole cloth and step into the world with nothing of claim except a nascent vision. Only later would it come to be understood that such stark expression was a tipping balance between life and death. But we are spared that here. This is a hymn to the hopeful brilliance of youth.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 267 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco; Reprint edition (November 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patti Smith
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	The Fiction 2010 National Book Award Winner:The Lord of Misrule by Jaime Gordon

Bibliography:

• Seventh Heaven: Poems (1972)
• Witt (1973)
• Ha! Ha! Houdini (1977)
• Babel: Poems (1978)
• Woolgathering (1992)
• Early Work: 1970-1975 (1994)
• The Coral Sea: Stories (1996)
• Patti Smith Complete (1998)
• Strange Messenger (2003)
• Auguries of Innocence: Poems (2005)
• Land 250 (2008)
• Trois (2008)
• Just Kids (January 2010)

Discography:

• Horses (1975)
• Radio Ethiopia (1976)
• Easter (1978)
• Wave (1979)
• Dream of Life (1988)
• Gone Again (1996)
• Peace and Noise (1997)
• Gung Ho (2000)
• Land (1975-2002) (2002)
• Trampin’ (2004)
• Twelve (2007)
• The Coral Sea (2008)

“This was the sound that, on the Western Front, had begun to drown out the music of the world. It was clear to Alessandro, and easily understandable, that, for some, music would cease to exist. But not for him, not for him. The electricity rose up his spine and he trembled not from shock but because, over the sound of the guns, he was still able to hear sonatas, symphonies, and songs.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (NOV 06, 2010)

Alessandro Giuliani is listening to field guns being tested in Munich in 1914, the year before Italy entered the War against Germany and Austria. Although mostly interested in the visual arts, Alessandro should know about music and beauty of all kinds; as a Professor of Aesthetics, it is his metier. But he learns about it the hard way. When the war breaks out, he is just about to take his doctorate at the University of Bologna. He volunteers for the Italian navy in the hope of avoiding conscription into the trenches, but he ends up in some of the worst fighting of the war nonetheless, facing the Austrians across the river Isonzo. Subsequent phases of the war will take him to Sicily, the high Alps, and many other places, and he proves as natural a soldier as he is an aesthetician. Alessandro’s appreciation of beauty, which shines through every chapter of his reminiscences as an old man in the 1960s, has not emerged despite his exposure to death and danger, but because of them.

“From the quarry, scepters of light emerged at sharp angles, like mineral crystals, and the thicket from which they came was a fume of light. Sometimes the beams were cranked into different positions as if they were choosing new targets among the stars. Hundreds of men worked below, in a brilliance that made the vast quarry look like a piece of bright moon that had crashed to earth. They appeared to be mining not stone but white light, and when they took the stone in slabs and caused it to float through empty space, tracked by searchlights, hanging on gossamer cables and unseen chains, it was as if they were handling light in cubic measure, cutting and transporting it in dense self-generating quanta from the heart of magical cliffs.”

Alessandro’s image of looking down into a marble quarry as men work through the night to make tombstones for the Italian dead is one of dozens that have stuck with me indelibly since I first read this wonderful book a decade ago. It is a magical image, cinematic in its theatricality and scale, yet the men down below are prisoners working murderous sixteen-hour shifts, and Alessandro is about to join them. Yet he finds wonder everywhere: in a midnight bathe in the Isonzo between the two front lines, in the sunlight glinting off a flight of birds that feed off the battlefield dead, in the walls of flame from burning stubble that line the Italian coast as he travels slowly southward on a cattle steamer, in the fury of a thunderstorm breaking over icebound peaks, in galloping a fine stallion across the plains of Hungary. “And how does God speak to you?” somebody asks him; “In the language of everything that is beautiful,” he replies.

I cannot think of any other book more full of amazement. The only other modern thing that comes close in fantasy, wonder, or scale is David Mitchell’s recent The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. But this comparison also points to a weakness that I noticed on second reading but missed or excused the first time. At 800 pages, it is a long book, slow to get started and over-extended at the end. Although Helprin skillfully sets up the combination of reality and imagination at the beginning, and is careful to ensure that every episode, however colorful, is also realistically plausible, the long sequence of such events demands an increasing suspension of disbelief. There comes a time, after about 500 pages, when one wonders how many more humps and turns this roller-coaster has. There is also a bizarre thread, involving a former employee of Alessandro’s father, a diminutive mad clerk placed in an important position at the Ministry of War, which seems more in the manner of Catch-22 than the basic seriousness of the rest of the book.

And it is serious. It is a book about God, and honor, and joy, and endurance, and above all about love. Love in a spiritual sense, love among families, love between friends, the love of man for woman. There is a moment early in the book when Alessandro comes upon a young girl weeping quietly beside a Roman fountain at night. There is another when he goes to Venice to look at the enigmatic picture by Giorgione known as “La tempesta,” involving a young soldier and a naked woman with a baby facing one another against the background of a gathering storm. Both gleam with that magical grace which Helprin conjures so effortlessly. But both will resonate throughout the book to wondrous effect, more than once bringing tears to my eyes, and lingering in my mind for ever.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 210 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books (June 1, 2005)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mark Helprin
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Roger’s review) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Betsey’s review)

Bibliography:

• A Dove of the East and Other Stories (1975)
• Refiner’s Eye (1978)
• Ellis Island and Other Stories (1981)
• Winter’s Tale (1983)
• A Soldier of the Great War (1991)
• Memoir from Antproof Case (1995)
• The Pacific and Other Stories (2004)
• Freddy and Fredericka (2005)
• In Sunlight and in Shadow (October 2012)

Illustrated Trilogy (with Chris van Allsburg):

• Swan Lake (1989)
• A City in the Winter (1996)
• A Veil of Snows (1997)
• A Kingdom Far and Clear: The Complete Trilogy (October 2010)

Nonfiction:

• Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto (2009)

“I want interviews, features, you name it,” Bosco went on. “Fill up my life with that shit. Let’s document every fucking humiliation. That is reality, right? You don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (NOV 03, 2010)

In Jennifer’s Egan’s lively and inventive novel – A Visit From The Goon Squad – each of its characters feels his or her mortality. Each is a in a tenuous danse-a-deux with “the goon.”

Every chapter is told from a different character’s point of view and it is no accident that the novel starts with Sasha – the assistant of music producer Bennie Salazar, one of the key focal points. Sasha has sticky fingers and is constantly pirating away meaningless objects to compose “the warped core of her life.” These objects serve as talismans, placing her at arm’s length from the love she wants.

And Bennie? A one-time band member and arrogant indie genius, he is now one step removed from the action, adding flakes of gold to his coffee to enhance his libido and bemoaning the state of digital technology. Like Sasha, he’s at arm’s length from a direct connection with love and life in general.

Bennie and Sasha will never know much about each other – even though they’ve worked together for decades – but the reader comes to know them through various stories. We get to know Lou, Bennie’s charismatic, misbehaving, skirt-chasing mentor during a harrowing African safari; Dolly, the PR mogul who places her own daughter in harm’s way; Jules, the ex-con journalist whose lunch with a Hollywood grade B actress goes terribly wrong; Ted Hollander, Sasha’s art-loving uncle, who travels to Naples to find her. Each will add a little something to the puzzle.

Yet none of their stories is told in chronological order, or even through flashbacks. Rather, time is revealed like the grooves of a record album, jumping from track to track in what appears to be no particular order. As each character takes his or her own moment in the spotlight, he or she is desperate for a second chance and to hold off the approaching goon. At one point, Dolly reflects, “Her deeper error had preceded all that: she’s overlooked a seismic shift…Now and then (she) finds herself wondering what sort of event or convergence would define the new world in which she found herself, as Capote’s party had, or Woodstock, or Malcolm Forbes’s seventieth birthday, or the party for Talk Magazine. She had no idea.”

The rich, lush, adventurous life that these characters once lived is being replaced by PowerPoints (one young character reveals her story through a 40-page PowerPoint presentation), paid “parrots” who create social media buzz, truncated emails, and digital technology. As Egan’s characters “strut and fret” their last hours on the broader stage, the world of technology is making them increasingly irrelevant. When Alex – Sasha’s would be beau whom we meet in the first chapter – tells Bennie, “I don’t know what happened to me,” Bennie’s answer is, “You grew up, Alex…just like the rest of us.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 257 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 8, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jennifer Egan
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another genre bending new school novel: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Bibliography:

• Emerald City and Other Stories (1996)
• The Invisible Circus (1997)
• Look At Me (2001)
• The Keep (2007)
• A Visit from the Goon Squad (June 2010) /

Movies from Books:

• The Invisible Circle (2001)

“…The restoration of the old theater was so faithful that it hardly seemed possible her old friend was not still here. She thought if she turned, just so, she would see him standing center stage, winking at her during his bows as he had done the last time she saw him alive.

She sighed and tipped her head up to gaze past the soaring façade of four balconies to the sculpted trompe l’oeil ceiling with its splendid chandelier. There was a hidden passageway there, in the rafters of the theater, where compassionate Milanese had stowed Jews to save them from being sent to the internment camps. In 1943, the Allies had inadvertently bombed La Scala, smashing its roof and the upper levels to dust. Yet now it was restored to its glory, its history retained. The theater’s memory was even longer than Octavia’s.”

Book Review:

Review by Ann Wilkes  (OCT 31, 2010)

In spite of the bodice-ripper cover, Mozart’s Blood is not a romance. Unless of course by romance you mean a romantic age or setting. It is a vampire tale set in the world of opera and spans centuries. The details of the struggles, competition and fleeting rewards of being an opera singer create a very romantic backdrop indeed.

Marley’s heroine, the talented soprano Octavia Voss (as she is known in her present incarnation) is all business. Having been initiated together with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by the same vampire centuries before, she shares all his memories and understands his music better than anyone else. Opera is in her blood, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Octavia does have a companion. Ugo is neither brother nor lover, but is somehow closer than either. He keeps her safe and gives her injections so she doesn’t have to prowl the streets. In return he enjoys her voice and the opera. But she must never ask where he gets the liquid he injects into her vein. Ugo, a near-immortal himself, is kidnapped and tortured. But he will never betray those he has sworn to protect. Octavia, worried sick over the loss of Ugo and without a protector, must take matters into her own hands. The race is on to save Ugo and herself from a man whose ambition is leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake.

Marley’s prose is beautifully woven with the right balance of inner and outer conflict, rich descriptions, suspense and action.

“He grasped one of the branches to pull himself to his feet. When he pushed out of his shelter, a little drift of white flowers showered his bare shoulders.

The rising sun had not yet burned away the morning mist. His feet brushed dew from the patchy grass. He looked about for some sort of habitation. The grove stretched into the fog, the ghostly shapes of the trees fading into the gray. Birds he couldn’t see twittered among the trees.

His head ached ferociously, and the sour aftertaste of wine, bitter with opium, clung to his tongue. Not knowing what else to do, Ughetto turned toward the morning sun and crept forward.”

Marley creates strong female characters without sacrificing their femininity. Her characters reach, grow and break through barriers created by others or themselves.

The many flashbacks of both Ugo and Octavia were most welcome, adding texture to the story and depth to the characters. Marley’s dedication to research of the time periods and places is obvious, but never distracting nor gratuitous.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Kensington (July 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Ann Wilkes
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Louise Marley
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Ann’s interview with Louise Marley
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More vampire novels: Cerulean Sins by Laurell K. Hamilton From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris Soulless by Gail Carringer

Bibliography:

• The Terrorists of Irustan (1999)
• The Glass Harmonica (1999)
• The Maquisarde (2004)
• The Child Goddess (2004)
• Singer in the Snow (2005)
• Absalom’s Mother and Other Stories (2007)
• The Singers of Nevya (2009) (Includes Sing the Light, Sing the Warmth and Receive the Gift)
• Mozart’s Blood (July 2010)

Writing as Toby Bishop, the Horsemistress Saga:

• Airs Beneath the Moon (2006)
• Airs and Graces (2007)
• Airs of Night and Sea (2009)