Sunk in Wednesday's Sordid Charms
Jun. 10th, 2020 11:32 amWhat I've Finished Reading
The Mozart Season is a very gentle book by Virginia Euwer Wolff about the unbearable importance of everything. I don't know if I would actually have liked or appreciated it when I was its target audience, but I loved it this week. Allegra is a twelve-year-old violinist with musician parents and an older brother who does cartoons. She gets a summer job turning pages for different musicians her parents know, and their friends, and spends a lot of time practicing a Mozart concerto for the competition she's going to enter. and encounters other people and their losses and triumphs. Allegra is believably sensitive without being precocious. I loved her violin teacher with his parade of goofy music-joke sweatshirts and all the weird pep talks people give each other about art, the constant collaboration between hardheaded precision and mystical bullshit that secretly isn't bullshit at all.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer, have you read it? I think you would like it a lot.
"A world of words is never real," quips one of the characters in The Little Paris Bookshop, by way of excusing himself - but clearly some are less real than others. What makes the difference between a novel that creates its own momentum and a novel where even a trip to the ATM feels forced? This one tends to feel like its own outline, and not the most promising outline in the Trapper-Keeper, either. My grudging concession that TLPB was surprisingly well-written for a marzipan tourist trap evaporated shortly after Jean Perdu and his bookboathouse left Paris, which is to say about thirty pages into a nearly four-hundred-page book.
Back in Paris, Jean Perdu, the kindhearted bookseller who is burdened with both a sledgehammery name and a tragic lost-love backstory, meets a very young wunderkind novelist who is afraid of his own youth and success, and who always wears earmuffs because he's too downy a baby chicken to be sure of having a personality otherwise. They take off down the Seine in Perdu's houseboat/bookshop/with a piano in it because why the hell not, allegedly in search of Perdu's lost love except that Perdu already knows she's been dead for twenty years. Said lost love enters the narrative in a series of diary entries from the past, where she explains to herself how she's totally planning to marry this hometown guy because he represents home, but continue her affair with Perdu because he represents Paris, or something like that, and she has Promised To Always Say Yes to Life And Never No. Both men are soggy cinnamon rolls who exult, or think they ought to exult, in the elemental feminine vitality this supposedly represents. Anyway, the young author is like the son Perdu never had, obviously, so now they're friends. On a floating bookboat! With a piano, don't forget! And the cats, Kafka and Lindgren, who are by far the most believable characters in the book. Together, they meet some landscapes and culinary heritages and take on a few additional lecture-bearing characters. At one point an American novelist helpfully translates Perdu's name for the benefit of English-speaking readers, so that we don't miss another minute of the beautiful symbolism. John Lost, get it?
There's an impressively inert sequence of scenes at a secret tango club, and a magical book village populated entirely with booksellers, whose role in the story is absolutely null. There are some "twists" whose shape is so obvious that it's hard to tell if they were meant to be twists at all. Eventually they remember there was a lovelorn divorcee back at the apartment complex, and there you go. None of it is really even bad enough to be interesting, but I read it all anyway because it was such a consummate cloud of fluff.
In fairness, I should add that shortly after I wrote the above, I read the book-club extras in the back and there was a very vulnerable interview with the author about mourning her father and recovering from a neck injury, and then I felt bad. This should serve as a reminder to be nicer about books that didn't work for me, and/or not to read the book club extras.
What I Gave Up On After A Very Short Time
A Theory of Literary Production is no more - that is, it's fine and will go on to a new home; I probably should try to read something difficult soon, but will do better to start that journey with something I have a better chance of caring about. I also put The Bourbon Kings by J.R. Ward directly in the donate box without even making it to my customary fifty pages of good faith; the cheesily clipped faux-colloquial style filled me with too painful an awareness of the brevity of life, and I could tell right away I wasn't going to care about these allegedly sexy bad boy millionaires or the women who love them.
What I'm Reading Now
I'm Dying Laughing is a frantic, crowded book by Christina Stead about a couple of wealthy American communists who move to Europe after getting cut out by their American commie friends in the 1940s. Now they're spending about a billion dollars a week on black market groceries in postwar Paris because they can't expect their kids to adjust to Old World privation, flinging themselves into affairs that don't work out because the object of devotion wasn't actually talking about them in the first place, and yelling at each other about which one of them the tumbrils are going to come for first and why. This is actually a posthumous publication, put together out of drafts, but so far I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't told me; it's messy but the messiness could just as easily be deliberate. It's not quite as suffocating as Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, but it has some of the same resemblance to a humiliating memory that until this moment you were able to pretend was a dream.
Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd Series is a re-read, but I can already tell I'm going to keep it, just like I did last time. It has a wonderful selection of grumpy bastards talking about how they don't like to talk about their writing process. I'll probably appreciate it even more now than before because The Mozart Season was so good.
What I Plan to Read Next
I managed to get talked into signing up for another book club! I don't know if I'll end up attending, but there's plenty of time to decide still. The book is Pride of Eden, which I think is about a roadside zoo, but I'll find out. Also coming up: Giovanni's Room (a Staff Pick at the aforementioned bookstore, and all but guaranteed to be an improvement on Be Frank With Me), and Mrs. Warren's Profession, a play about Social Issues from the turn of one of our other centuries.
The Mozart Season is a very gentle book by Virginia Euwer Wolff about the unbearable importance of everything. I don't know if I would actually have liked or appreciated it when I was its target audience, but I loved it this week. Allegra is a twelve-year-old violinist with musician parents and an older brother who does cartoons. She gets a summer job turning pages for different musicians her parents know, and their friends, and spends a lot of time practicing a Mozart concerto for the competition she's going to enter. and encounters other people and their losses and triumphs. Allegra is believably sensitive without being precocious. I loved her violin teacher with his parade of goofy music-joke sweatshirts and all the weird pep talks people give each other about art, the constant collaboration between hardheaded precision and mystical bullshit that secretly isn't bullshit at all.
osprey_archer, have you read it? I think you would like it a lot. "A world of words is never real," quips one of the characters in The Little Paris Bookshop, by way of excusing himself - but clearly some are less real than others. What makes the difference between a novel that creates its own momentum and a novel where even a trip to the ATM feels forced? This one tends to feel like its own outline, and not the most promising outline in the Trapper-Keeper, either. My grudging concession that TLPB was surprisingly well-written for a marzipan tourist trap evaporated shortly after Jean Perdu and his bookboathouse left Paris, which is to say about thirty pages into a nearly four-hundred-page book.
Back in Paris, Jean Perdu, the kindhearted bookseller who is burdened with both a sledgehammery name and a tragic lost-love backstory, meets a very young wunderkind novelist who is afraid of his own youth and success, and who always wears earmuffs because he's too downy a baby chicken to be sure of having a personality otherwise. They take off down the Seine in Perdu's houseboat/bookshop/with a piano in it because why the hell not, allegedly in search of Perdu's lost love except that Perdu already knows she's been dead for twenty years. Said lost love enters the narrative in a series of diary entries from the past, where she explains to herself how she's totally planning to marry this hometown guy because he represents home, but continue her affair with Perdu because he represents Paris, or something like that, and she has Promised To Always Say Yes to Life And Never No. Both men are soggy cinnamon rolls who exult, or think they ought to exult, in the elemental feminine vitality this supposedly represents. Anyway, the young author is like the son Perdu never had, obviously, so now they're friends. On a floating bookboat! With a piano, don't forget! And the cats, Kafka and Lindgren, who are by far the most believable characters in the book. Together, they meet some landscapes and culinary heritages and take on a few additional lecture-bearing characters. At one point an American novelist helpfully translates Perdu's name for the benefit of English-speaking readers, so that we don't miss another minute of the beautiful symbolism. John Lost, get it?
There's an impressively inert sequence of scenes at a secret tango club, and a magical book village populated entirely with booksellers, whose role in the story is absolutely null. There are some "twists" whose shape is so obvious that it's hard to tell if they were meant to be twists at all. Eventually they remember there was a lovelorn divorcee back at the apartment complex, and there you go. None of it is really even bad enough to be interesting, but I read it all anyway because it was such a consummate cloud of fluff.
In fairness, I should add that shortly after I wrote the above, I read the book-club extras in the back and there was a very vulnerable interview with the author about mourning her father and recovering from a neck injury, and then I felt bad. This should serve as a reminder to be nicer about books that didn't work for me, and/or not to read the book club extras.
What I Gave Up On After A Very Short Time
A Theory of Literary Production is no more - that is, it's fine and will go on to a new home; I probably should try to read something difficult soon, but will do better to start that journey with something I have a better chance of caring about. I also put The Bourbon Kings by J.R. Ward directly in the donate box without even making it to my customary fifty pages of good faith; the cheesily clipped faux-colloquial style filled me with too painful an awareness of the brevity of life, and I could tell right away I wasn't going to care about these allegedly sexy bad boy millionaires or the women who love them.
What I'm Reading Now
I'm Dying Laughing is a frantic, crowded book by Christina Stead about a couple of wealthy American communists who move to Europe after getting cut out by their American commie friends in the 1940s. Now they're spending about a billion dollars a week on black market groceries in postwar Paris because they can't expect their kids to adjust to Old World privation, flinging themselves into affairs that don't work out because the object of devotion wasn't actually talking about them in the first place, and yelling at each other about which one of them the tumbrils are going to come for first and why. This is actually a posthumous publication, put together out of drafts, but so far I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't told me; it's messy but the messiness could just as easily be deliberate. It's not quite as suffocating as Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, but it has some of the same resemblance to a humiliating memory that until this moment you were able to pretend was a dream.
Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd Series is a re-read, but I can already tell I'm going to keep it, just like I did last time. It has a wonderful selection of grumpy bastards talking about how they don't like to talk about their writing process. I'll probably appreciate it even more now than before because The Mozart Season was so good.
What I Plan to Read Next
I managed to get talked into signing up for another book club! I don't know if I'll end up attending, but there's plenty of time to decide still. The book is Pride of Eden, which I think is about a roadside zoo, but I'll find out. Also coming up: Giovanni's Room (a Staff Pick at the aforementioned bookstore, and all but guaranteed to be an improvement on Be Frank With Me), and Mrs. Warren's Profession, a play about Social Issues from the turn of one of our other centuries.
