2009 – this edition LES FUGITIVES 2017
When I read this work, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
This book was sent to me yesterday as a gift out of the blue by a friend who knew I was interested in listening, with my innocent ear, to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, a book where this composer’s portrait is said to be featured in it. I shall now be reviewing it alongside Paul Auster’s ‘Oracle Night’ here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/19/oracle-night-paul-auster/
Read so far up to: “Schoenberg’s face versus the Nazis’ face—“
An all-consuming monologue (“the unquenchable stream of observations and ingenious associations that flowed from me, each new idea more striking, subtle, singular and wondrous than the last”) taking us from the bellow of a moocow, the touch of an arm (its ‘elbow’ being, for me, in the ‘bellow’) and what is below a plane flight, later on ’autopilot’ in an exhibition of Third Reich Art in interface with visits to German cafés and her teaching an accomplished male pianist about playing a Mozart piano concerto when she claims to us not to know anything about music, as I don’t, either. And knowing nothing known about cars, too, like me.
I have been researching the Wannsee and Heydrich on 20 January 1942 overseen from the writer’s sororal plane, and Schoenberg’s position in the Nazis and Music syndrome. A context for this ever-compelling soliloquy that has word associations to die for. Theodor Adorno, Thomas Mann, Beethoven’s bust and howl, and I am, alongside the soliloquist’s crush, mesmerised, too, by the café pianist she describes, an alternate para-situation which makes me think of Dr Faustus and the Magic Mountain, and the aesthetics of music where contrast feeds on contrast to allow one to soar! And bovines to bellow from below! Read up to: “…and you’ll die of shame.”
Read up to: “…the cuckoos’ debut…”
Resonating with this very tuckoo’s moocow? Much hangs on the pianist, when arriving amid the soliloquist’s pent breath at sight of him, choosing a blended malt not a single. (Being mid-air in the blue, between earth and heaven, is, for a human being, sort of blended, too?)
Read up to: “…kept quiet so as not to disturb.”
“The pianist’s fingers practising in mid-air…”
‘Vision’ and ‘counter-vision’, point and counterpoint, phrase and ‘counter-phrase’, echoing my contrasts above feeding off each other, incapable to talk about music but ‘dying’ to do so, “still and temporary life with the natural memory of Schoenberg captured in paint.” Reading this soliloquy is increasingly like listening to his piano music, which I intend as a compliment, because I often listen to it out of innocent-ear choice not knowledgeable duty. Her sister and then mother-in-law, and tennis, bones and sinew, “the substance of my own body”, and I think of elbow again in this context, as there is the accompaniment’s touching of the pianist’s right knee which was the next best thing. Sorry how this aide memoire’s forced strain that it sometimes puts on the book’s “malleable” sinews or connections, but I feel this is in keeping with the strain on the body when playing a twelve-tone piano (whatever twelve-tone means!), even on a brain reading a book like this.
“…to leave the Earth and see it from the porthole, to see it and not be there, suddenly simply not be there.”
Read up to: “the blue’s chill negativity”
….which is preternatural following my reading of this section of Oracle Night a half an hour before just reading the next section of the Lefebvre: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/19/oracle-night-paul-auster/#comment-28379
Much on collective happiness, the narrator’s mother in law’s tennis club, the narrator’s unworkable marriage and Schoenberg refusing “the collective morals of musical happiness”, and the sororal mid-air flight arguably with a rugby ball as violin case, a violin bringing to my mind a pumping elbow!
Today I read about another self-portrait in a significant footnote of ORACLE NIGHT here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/19/oracle-night-paul-auster/#comment-28383
The multiple crossings and uncrossings of her legs, (because doing so with elbows is impossible in a similar way?) the pianist in interface with Schoenberg’s blue face, is the pianist seeing the soliloquist in the inner way the soliloquist believes he sees her?
Read up to “…like a tragic history.”
“….I took music seriously with Adorno on one knee and Mann answering him from the other one, with the pair of them on my wobbly knees and moreover the pianist who went on making me bellow in silence…”
From knees to bellow, this seems very telling, especially now in the context of all the violin playing “like a nutter” by her sister on a plane, and what do tennis and violins have in common, yes you guessed it! Thoughts about being an airplane pilot, too, bombs, terrorists, being a composer of music like Schoenberg’s &c.
The pianist taking her to the cinema where we have the equally telling popcorn scene, whereby I have now read up to…
“….digging about in the paper bag and raising handfuls to his mouth through the trailers, elbow on the armrest fulfilling the elementary function of a lever…”
“I’d be folding my legs around, crossing and uncrossing them and hooking them onto my arms,…”
From popcorn, her cleavage, foetal positions &c. to Brecht’s house and corpses, did you know (my question, not the book’s) that the last parts of a dead body to show signs of de-composition are usually the elbows?
Read up to: “, her eternally not forever but right now.”
Read up to: “…and I slide into a state of melancholy.”
Attending the Deutsche Oper with her sister for Wagner’s Tannhäuser and arguably Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1 instead of a pre-concert talk. Wagner’s Wirkung and our Third Reich fears of or from him, if not from his music itself, and I compare his Leitmotifs with this book’s Leitmotifs, including the ‘bellow’.
Cross-referenced again with the para-Oracle Night: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/19/oracle-night-paul-auster/#comment-28393
“Now the usual accompaniment had gone up to the pianist and taken his hands, incredibly relaxed hands while the rest of the pianist’s body except those two extremities was stiffer than a stiff, had kissed the palm of one then traced from there along the beloved forearm, then up to the shoulder beloved likewise embraced the pianist and taking the pianist like a baby into her arms,…”
An important passage for my aide memoire, where explicit mention of the elBoWS is studiously omitted, except for those letters in upper case. I know this is a translation, but that fact makes it even more important, as much is made of the soliloquist and her sister, often putting a hand on the other’s arm, with all manner of contortion, including the pianist booed and hissed when performing ‘twelve tone’ music with ‘a sudden drop into tonality’, the word pianist sounding like penis in English, and the two women needing to “pee” or even “piss” in various public arty tourist places. And the soliloquist seemingly making love with the pianist following that long quote above.
“…in Brecht’s house, you have to go through decomposition in order to regain composure…”
Read up to: “…no one apart from me who would betray myself with this ending.”
“…the opening whisper of the composer’s Blue Self-Portrait, a polyphony of disjointed timbres…”
But what of Auster’s Dachau babe? Leitmotifs accrete, feeding off each other, too numerous to mention again here, and despite the hands-on pianist with the soliloquist’s body and various ‘ors’ between figures like Schoenberg, Wagner, AdORno, Mann, Proust, Bergson – Sony Cinema OR a roomette – – and as the sORORal plane went ‘lower and lower’ what I spotted, amidst the pianist’s “resistant music” beneath the eponymous self-portrait, was an “arm-bomb” somewhere in the text until Lewis’ English translation’s disjointed timbre at near-end as a pre-coda ‘resistant’ orga(ni)sm from all hand- and arm-play, viz.
“…Schoenberg with his one blue ear frightens him when the usual accompaniment read propped on her elbow,…”
END