50BC08 #7: Doctor Faustus

50 BOOK CHALLENGE #7
BOOK: Doctor Faustus
AUTHOR: Thomas Mann (Translator, John E. Woods)
YEAR: 1947 (Vintage International Edition, 1999)
PAGES: 534
GENRE: fiction
RATING: 4.5 stars out of 5


In partial thanks to Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise, Thomas Mann's 1947 novel Doctor Faustus is enjoying a renewed popularity, at least with those of us in the music community. I finished it yesterday morning, only to meet with a notable musicologist that same afternoon who had a copy of the novel in his hand. I started it well before I knew of Ross' reference to it, but found it a lovely coincidence when I began reading Ross' book about a month into my reading of Doctor Faustus.

It is rare that it takes three months for me to finish a novel, but I have a few theories as to why this was (aside from the rigors of a teaching schedule/adjunct commute).
The novel operates on so many levels it is difficult to read more than a few chapters before you need to stop to digest. Keeping track of the numerous secondary characters is a painstaking, but worthwhile, endeavor. Mann forms his environment with this multitude, presenting a photograph of German bourgeois life in the early 20th century.

The book warrants musicological analysis in its debt to Schoenberg, its continuation of the intimate connection between Faust and music, and its portraiture of Germanic musical existence (for starters). But even outside of musicological inquiry*, the book is full of literary paths one can tread should they choose. The relationship between the book's narrator and his forsaken hero, Adrian, dallies in sentiments rarely explored between two male characters. There are some echoes of Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund, except that Adrian Leverkühn's encounter with "love" comes with dire consequences.

I'd like to re-read the novel with a focus on the music only, because what resonated for me most loudly was how the book serves as a treatise on the dangers of blind nationalism. The narrator, Zeitblom, frustrates the reader with his various digressions, until you realize they are not digressions at all but allegories. His reflections about wartime Germany telescope into Adrian's own struggles. There were moments that made me stop and put the book down as I was yanked into my own reality:

"...the democracy of the West--however outdate its institutions may prove over time, however obstinately its notion of freedom resists what is new and necessary--is nonetheless essentially on the side of human progress, of the goodwill to perfect society, and is by its very nature capable of renewal, improvement, rejuvenation, of proceeding toward conditions that provide greater justice in life." (358)

I suppose I still believe this...but I note also Zeitblom's comments a couple of pages earlier regarding Germany:

"It is the demand of a regime that does not wish to grasp, that apparently does not understand even now, that it has been condemned, that it must vanish, laden witht eh curse of having made itself intolerable to the world--no, of having made us, Germany, the Reich, let me go farther and say, Germanness, everything German, intolerable to the world." (356)

This is why I read.

Readers who have no musical background will likely find themselves frustrated with some of the lengthy musical explications. I suggest skipping/skimming them. Normally I would never recommend this, but there is so much else to be had from reading this novel that it would be such a disservice to throw the myriad babies out with the musical bathwater. For the musically-inclined reader, however, the plethora of references to composers and pieces is a ready-made listening list and a chance to experience a nation's struggle with both political and aesthetic ideologies.

* Dial M recommends Edward Said's On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. I have not yet read this book, but it is on the list!

(Crossposted)

Wonderful Resource for Book Reviews

Natasha, at Maw Books, has compiled hundreds of online reviews at Book Bloggers' Book Reviews.
What a fantastic resource!!

I hope to have some in-progress thoughts/reviews posted soon regarding Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, and Borg/Crossan's The First Christmas (yes, I know we just passed Easter.)

In the meantime, I hope to upload some of my old reading reviews so they will all be consolidated here.

50BC08 #6: The Tipping Point

50 BOOK CHALLENGE # 6 BOOK: The Tipping Point AUTHOR: Malcolm Gladwell YEAR: 2002, Back Bay Books (paperback ed.) PAGES: 301 GENRE: non-fiction, sociology RATING: 4.5 stars out of 5 My TBR list is so large that it is no longer a goal, but more of a path. I've tried to say I won't buy any more books until I make a considerable dent in the unread pile I currently own. However, my desire to dialogue with the world at large compels me to buy a few bestsellers here and there just so I'm not out of the loop. Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point has called to me for several years now and I've read the back cover so many times now I have it memorized. I usually have some healthy skepticism about books that have been hugely popular (I prefer "healthy skepticism" to "elitism," thank you), but this book has been recommended by a variety of friends, so I finally picked it up. The idea of a "social epidemic" is important, and the biggest lessons in this book are in the stories about people like Georgia Sadler, who utilized folklorists and hairstylists to get the word out about breast cancer and diabetes. But the book should not breed too much careless optimism: While little things CAN make a big difference, they do not always make a BIG difference. If "social epidemics" become our only goal, I fear the motivation will be lost to do the right thing just because it is the right thing. However, Gladwell does get to the heart of the matter: "What must underlie epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus." (258) It is that bedrock belief that is so hard to nurture, especially now. It is, I believe, the real "audacity of hope" (to borrow from current politics). So, while we might try to be one of Gladwell's "connectors" or "mavens" or "salesmen," we also need to be members of the "dreamers"--that contingent who supports the hope upon which all change rests. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in social phenomena, psychology, cultural dynamics, and/or becoming a "mover & shaker." Be sure to read the edition that includes the Afterword: "Tipping Point Lessons From the Real World" where Gladwell warns us against the "rise of Immunity" as we begin to take our technological achievements for granted.

50BC08:#5 The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (Bender)

Having read and enjoyed Bender's Willful Creatures, I was surprised at how few of these stories resonated for me. Bender is a master of the quirky, but many of these stories seemed so esoteric that the witty commentary was lost along the way. I felt they were sexually saturated almost to the point of obsession (in many cases), but I'm also open to the idea that it was part of the point. All that said, there were several stories I di...more 50 Book Challenge #5: BOOK: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt AUTHOR: Aimee Bender PAGES: 184 (Anchor Books, 1999) GENRE: short stories, contemporary fiction RATED: 3.5 /5 stars Having read and enjoyed Bender's Willful Creatures I was surprised at how few of these stories resonated for me. Bender is a master of the quirky, but many of these stories seemed so esoteric that the witty commentary was lost along the way. I felt they were sexually saturated almost to the point of obsession (in many cases), but I'm also open to the idea that it was part of the point. All that said, there were several stories I did enjoy, including the majority of the offerings in Part Three. The poignancy in "Skinless" (Part One), "The Healer" and "Loser" (both in Part Three) touched me deeply, particularly in the case of "Loser." Bender investigates what it means to be "lost" and indeed, "found." Her protagonist has the ironic gift to find what others have lost and the end of the story made my eyes glisten. "Drunken Mimi" (Part Two) is a clever mixing of fantasy and realism wherein two outcasts find each other through a world that has long rejected impishness and magic. I do think that Bender's work speaks differently to the reader depending on his/her frame of mind, place in life, etc. This is a positive, as there will be a story for everyone in this collection. I'll be interested to re-read these stories several years from now and see if they speak any differently to me. For indeed, Bender does have a gift for stories that speak.

Memoir Fraud

I found this article to be very intriguing. John Dolan discusses fabricated memoirs and why people feel compelled to write them and read them. It is a fairly provocative and uncomfortable article in some of its points, and I do find him to be a bit sanctimonious in his condemnation of "middle-class " readers and people who watch TV for escapism.

It got me thinking, however, about the lines between truth and fiction, and how our categorization of literature into different genres has a lot of implications for "artistic license." There are plenty of works masquerading as fiction that are actually memoirs. Is claiming something to be fabricated when it is in fact true any better than falsifying a memoir? I'm not sure. It is a different kind of dishonesty--one that is probably less hurtful to the reader. Yes, I know that fiction will often draw upon the life experiences of the author, but when you can identify real-life people (who are still living) in a fictional work, I think that needs to be addressed. The disclaimer one finds in fiction, about any resemblance of the characters to real and living persons being coincidental, is there for a reason. It exists because too often the connections are not coincidental and are an opportunity for the author to air dirty laundry under the safety net of "fiction."

50BC06 #7: Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules

50 Book Challenge #7
BOOK REVIEW: Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules
Edited by David Sedaris

This is a compilation of David Sedaris’ favorite short stories by literary greats such as Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor and Dorothy Parker, just to name a few. With a crowd like this, you can expect stories that will leave you ever so slightly unsettled, such as Tobias Wolff’s "Bullet in the Brain" and Lorrie Moore’s troubling tromp through a pediatric cancer ward in "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk." The stories seem to gather eccentric value as the book progresses. They are provocative and probably not best read right before bed. But Sedaris has indeed gathered the best of the best, and each of the stories represents an intricate piece of literary art.

Posted here 9/12/08, originally posted 3/2/06.

But there is another reason to buy this book. All the proceeds benefit 826NYC, an afterschool tutoring organization that also does community outreach by way of writing workshops for young people. Literature to help foster literature—it is a great idea and one worthy of support.

50BC08: #4 Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music

50 BOOK CHALLENGE #4
TITLE: Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music (Dover, 1962)
AUTHORS: Claude Debussy, Ferruccio Busoni, Charles Ives
GENRE: non-fiction
PAGES: 188
4 out of 5 stars

One of the joys of reading about aesthetics, particularly as the field applies to music, is that there is such a variance of thought about what is beautiful. For all three of the authors included in this collection, beauty is not solely defined by consonance and dissonance. These composer-authors grapple with the role of inspiration, philosophical contexts, and music itself.

Claude Debussy, "Monsieur Croche the Dilettante Hater" (1927)
Debussy does not mince words and offers invective toward everything from opera to arts administration. It is more music criticism than a specific treatise on aesthetics. It is impossible, however, to read this group of essays without tasting the clear flavor of Debussy's own aesthetic agenda. For example, the Paris Opera, for Debussy, "...continue[s] to produce curious noises which the people who pay call music, but there is no need to believe them implicitly." (24)


Ferruccio Busoni, "Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music "(1911)
Busoni gives the reader a more straightforward offering complete with footnotes and musical examples. However, even Busoni likes to wax poetic: "Tradition is a plaster mask taken from life..." (n.1, p. 7). In another footnote, Busoni makes the case for microtonality, attacking the idea of musical "purity":


But what is "pure," and what "impure?" We hear a piano "gone out of tune," and whose intervals may thus have become "pure, but unserviceable," and it sounds impure to us. The diplomatic "Twelve-semitone system" is an invention mothered by necessity yet none the less do we sedulously guard its imperfections. (89)


Charles Ives, "Essays before a Sonata" (1920)
It is Ives' contribution that is the most beautiful read. He offers an essay that is one part program note (for the Concord Sonata (1915, rev. 1947)) to two parts philosophical and aesthetic treatise. Writing with all the passion and transcendental fervor he can muster, Ives presents various New England literary figureheads as aesthetes, blurring the line between the artistry of literature and that of music.