When I pick out my books, I don't have a specific process. I'll give almost anything a try. If I've heard something about it or seen it displayed repeatedly, I'll check it out. If I like the cover or the title, I'll check it out. I figure that as long as you make timely returns, getting books from the library is risk-free. If it sucks, what have you wasted? If it's good, your adventuresome tastes have been rewarded. But sometimes there are books that are in a whole other category of good, and Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of them.
After I finished the book, I read the back and realized something shocking to a modern reader -- it's unblurbable. The back merely describes it as "a tale of moral isolation in a small Southern town." Well, what the hell does that mean? The style of the book is one that you simply don't see anymore. Nothing specific HAPPENS in this book, really. Nor can you say that it's totally character-driven.
In fact, it's much like real life. Imagine, for a moment, that you've found yourself in this small Southern town during the Depression. It's night, and you don't know what to do with yourself, so when you pass by the bar, you go in. It's not completely dead in there, but the bartender doesn't have much to do and is in a talkative mood, so he talks to you. He tells you all about his own life and his relationship with his wife. He points out one patron and tells you that the guy is a deaf-mute and has been eating the same three meals a day there for weeks now. He points out another guy and says he's been here just under a week, but he's getting drunker and more belligerant every night. While you're talking and drinking, a girl of about twelve or thirteen comes in and buys a pack of cigarettes. The bartender sells them to her without comment. The belligerant guy gets up and starts yelling at the deaf-mute, talking some nonsense about how the deaf-mute "knows." The belligerant guy gets ejected only to cause a sensation by staggering back in with a black man (remember, it's the 1930's South). The bartender finally sorts things out, stamps out the impending fight, gets the black man safely out of the bar, and conducts the belligerant drunk out the door with the deaf-mute, who's offered the man a place to sleep it off.
You've just met all of the principals of this book. But you don't realize it yet. They all turn out to be interesting in different ways. Two things bind them all together: their mutual fascination with the deaf-mute, Mr. Singer, and the fact that they are all seekers. The young smoker, whose first name is Mick, is somewhere in the middle of a large family that has converted their home into a boarding house. But somehow, deep inside of her, there is music. She has a tremendous gift, she can remember entire symphonies and compose even though she can't play any instruments herself, learning how is what she dreams of. The black man who got dragged into the bar is the black doctor in town. He has spent his whole life trying to uplift his fellow blacks, who are mostly poor and uneducated in his town. In the process, it largely cost him his own family.
I won't tell you about the rest of the people in the bar, for finding out is one of the pleasures of the book. It's also a rare pleasure, too. Modern novels seem to me to be much "busier". They all have destinations and beginnings. They are highways, and this book is a meandering county route, as the main characters all engage in their solitary, forlorn hunts for a kindred spirit and soulmate.
The book is also interesting in an anthropological way. I saw a program on TV once about a certain section of New York City (I can't remember which one). They talked about a movie that had been filmed there in the 1940s, a largely forgettable one, but one thing that stuck with me was a comment from their interviewee. He pointed out that in the movie, people hang out on their stoops, listen to the radio together, and walk around simply for the sake of seeing what was going on. He then said that television was introduced two years later, and that all of that came to a grinding halt. This book gives a glimpse of life before television, too. Young Mick making her "radio rounds," hiding in the bushes of classical music listeners to hear their radios. Biff, the belligerant drunk, working at the "Sunny Dixie Show," a cut-rate fair with one ride and a bunch of carnival games whose circuit embraced the outskirts of the town. The black doctor's daughter going to pitch horseshoes on Saturday nights.
You don't see that sort of thing much anymore. The novelty of a "Sunny Dixie Show" would wear off fast even in small towns. Horseshoes and other such games are generally a sideline a party where everyone already knows each other, not an organized event where strangers might meet. And the minute Mick got too close to a house, all of the motion-sensor lights would come on and she'd soon find herself trying to explain her love of music to the police.
Not that the world of this unspecified small Southern town was all roses, of course. Many, many bad things happen in the course of this book. The black doctor and his family are all good people, but are affected profoundly by the racism of the town and of the era. Mick's family loses their fight to stay afloat due to a tragic and foolish accident. The joy of the Sunny Dixie Show is marred by brawling. These realities make the quests of the main characters all the more poignant and vital. And much of the change that has happened since the 1930s is, of course, positive. But in reading this book, I couldn't help think of the ways that technology has cut people off from each other. The heart is still a lonely hunter, but with fewer grounds to hunt in.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Where Are All The Posts?
So, astute observers of both this blog and the calendar may have noticed that although National Blog Posting Month (affectionately known as NaBloPoMo) is underway, I have not been posting every day so far this week. I don't intend to do it for the rest of this month, or this year, either.
Why? I guess it just ran its course with me. When I first heard about it, as an offshoot of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, also in November), it seemed like a fun and doable project for me. And it was! I made all thirty days. I visited the NaBloPoMo website frequently. I joined every interest group I could find, and made two or three of my own. I met lots and lots of other bloggers who were supportive on those days when you just had nothing to say. It made me think differently about this blog and helped me break out of the "read a book and review it" format I'd developed. I started doing memes and thematic posts. It was a lot of fun, and I couldn't wait to do it again next year.
I started "training" for it in October, trying to blog more regularly in order to help get in the swing of things. I visited the NaBloPoMo page on the first day of the challenge, and regularly afterwards. But something was different. There's a sidebar that shows recent activity on the site. The first year I did this, the sidebar could barely keep up. You'd join a bunch of groups, make a bunch of comments, come back ten minutes later, and all of your stuff would have been bumped out of the siderbar. Last year, the sidebar barely seemed to move. The main page, with the "random featured blogposts of the day" quickly sprouted cobwebs. I'd ask for a writing prompt from a group, and no one would reply.
On one of the rare occasions where I actually managed a conversation with another site member, she said that she felt that extending NaBloPoMo year round changed the feel of things. Or maybe it was the economy, the election, the weather, or any other random external referent. Who knows. But without the community, it quickly became the equivalent of taking a vow to vaccuum the living room every day for a month. Just. Not. Fun. I wasn't excited about reaching the goal, I didn't typically get upset when I was struggling, it became kind of meaningless.
So this year, I made my own sort of challenge. I believe this is post #362 since I started this blog. My goal is to hit 400 by the end of 2009. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...
Why? I guess it just ran its course with me. When I first heard about it, as an offshoot of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, also in November), it seemed like a fun and doable project for me. And it was! I made all thirty days. I visited the NaBloPoMo website frequently. I joined every interest group I could find, and made two or three of my own. I met lots and lots of other bloggers who were supportive on those days when you just had nothing to say. It made me think differently about this blog and helped me break out of the "read a book and review it" format I'd developed. I started doing memes and thematic posts. It was a lot of fun, and I couldn't wait to do it again next year.
I started "training" for it in October, trying to blog more regularly in order to help get in the swing of things. I visited the NaBloPoMo page on the first day of the challenge, and regularly afterwards. But something was different. There's a sidebar that shows recent activity on the site. The first year I did this, the sidebar could barely keep up. You'd join a bunch of groups, make a bunch of comments, come back ten minutes later, and all of your stuff would have been bumped out of the siderbar. Last year, the sidebar barely seemed to move. The main page, with the "random featured blogposts of the day" quickly sprouted cobwebs. I'd ask for a writing prompt from a group, and no one would reply.
On one of the rare occasions where I actually managed a conversation with another site member, she said that she felt that extending NaBloPoMo year round changed the feel of things. Or maybe it was the economy, the election, the weather, or any other random external referent. Who knows. But without the community, it quickly became the equivalent of taking a vow to vaccuum the living room every day for a month. Just. Not. Fun. I wasn't excited about reaching the goal, I didn't typically get upset when I was struggling, it became kind of meaningless.
So this year, I made my own sort of challenge. I believe this is post #362 since I started this blog. My goal is to hit 400 by the end of 2009. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...
Thursday, November 5, 2009
My Life in Letters
This week's BTT question:
I much prefer autobiographies to biographies. There are always holes in biographies. Even though they're more objective, you never feel as if you're getting the entire story.
The biography I just finished is a good example. Nyiregyhazi was allegedly working on an autobiography that has since been lost. I'd love to know how he viewed himself. It's easy to come to conclusions about him and his life. Easy to draw a direct line between his tightly controlled childhood and inability to cope with the demands of a career as a concert pianist, easy to draw similar conclusions about his relationship with his mother and his ten marriages. Did he draw the same conclusions, though? Or did he attribute his troubles to something else?
Another good example of this problem can be found in the biography of Axl Rose: W.A.R by Mick Wall. In this case, Axl wouldn't talk with Mick Wall because Wall had pissed him off over fifteen years ago. So Wall's source material consisted primarily of interviews with the few friends and ex-bandmates that are willing to talk about their time with Axl, and interviews from Guitar World and Rolling Stone, which I myself have yellowing in the closet of my childhood bedroom. What's clear from the book is that Axl was up to something that he was not choosing to share with very many people.
Autobiographies can be more revealing that someone else's perspective ever could. Joan Crawford was widely regarded as an excellent mother until Mommie Dearest came out. In Lillian Gish's outraged and near-tearful defense of her mentor DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation, you learn more about the regard she had for DW Griffith than a thousand biographers could ever say. A biographer might be tempted to psychoanalyze the behvaior of Motley Crue over the years, but he or she probably wouldn't draw the same simple conclusion that the Crue itself did: "We did all this stuff because it was fun. When it quit being fun and nearly killed us, we stopped, but that was the only reason why. If they ever invent a type of drug that won't ruin your life, we are SO THERE."
So, I definitely prefer autobiographies. Even with the ghostwriter, they get at what biographies never really can: the subject's actual experience of his or her life.
It’s All About Me November 5, 2009
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:36 am
Which do you prefer? Biographies written about someone? Or Autobiographies written by the actual person (and/or ghost-writer)?
I much prefer autobiographies to biographies. There are always holes in biographies. Even though they're more objective, you never feel as if you're getting the entire story.
The biography I just finished is a good example. Nyiregyhazi was allegedly working on an autobiography that has since been lost. I'd love to know how he viewed himself. It's easy to come to conclusions about him and his life. Easy to draw a direct line between his tightly controlled childhood and inability to cope with the demands of a career as a concert pianist, easy to draw similar conclusions about his relationship with his mother and his ten marriages. Did he draw the same conclusions, though? Or did he attribute his troubles to something else?
Another good example of this problem can be found in the biography of Axl Rose: W.A.R by Mick Wall. In this case, Axl wouldn't talk with Mick Wall because Wall had pissed him off over fifteen years ago. So Wall's source material consisted primarily of interviews with the few friends and ex-bandmates that are willing to talk about their time with Axl, and interviews from Guitar World and Rolling Stone, which I myself have yellowing in the closet of my childhood bedroom. What's clear from the book is that Axl was up to something that he was not choosing to share with very many people.
Autobiographies can be more revealing that someone else's perspective ever could. Joan Crawford was widely regarded as an excellent mother until Mommie Dearest came out. In Lillian Gish's outraged and near-tearful defense of her mentor DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation, you learn more about the regard she had for DW Griffith than a thousand biographers could ever say. A biographer might be tempted to psychoanalyze the behvaior of Motley Crue over the years, but he or she probably wouldn't draw the same simple conclusion that the Crue itself did: "We did all this stuff because it was fun. When it quit being fun and nearly killed us, we stopped, but that was the only reason why. If they ever invent a type of drug that won't ruin your life, we are SO THERE."
So, I definitely prefer autobiographies. Even with the ghostwriter, they get at what biographies never really can: the subject's actual experience of his or her life.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
The Last Jewell
Finishing the last of all the books a particular author has written is bittersweet. It's worse if the author is dead, because there will be no more. But even with a living author, it's bittersweet. You're done discovering now, and just waiting for something new, like everyone else.
In the case of Lisa Jewell, the last, quite randomly, happened to be the first. Ralph's Party was the novel she wrote on a bet, after losing the last in a succession of shitty jobs, and it launched her career.
The book deals with similar themes as most of her other books. Volumes and volumes have been written about the frothy, initial venture into adulthood, which usually winds up looking more like a kid's version of adulthood accompanied by a shitty job. But it seems that there's less about exploring the second phase of adulthood, the one which involves mortgages and babies and responsible jobs. Jewell's books deal with these themes, and with the inherent conflicts and ambivalence that often accompany these life decisions. Many of her characters have a sort of creative and bohemian bent, and don't want to become their parents. Yet, they realize they're getting a bit old to rent grungy apartments, stay out drinking all night, and indulge in random hookups.
Most of these conflicts have a satisfactory, if not totally happy, resolution in Jewell's books. Ralph's Party is no exception. The twin plots in the book are loosely bound together by the fact that the principals all live in the same apartment building. In the basement, the rivaly-friendship of stuffed-shirt Smith and freewheeling artist Ralph is shaken when they acquire a pretty female flatmate named Jem. Above them, long-term couple Siobhan and Karl and trying to sort out their future. Siobhan has not worked in a while, has put on weight, and is feeling at loose ends, old and unattractive. Karl, although still very attracted to his girlfriend, has had an utterly meaningless affair with Cheri from the top floor. His life has also changed with a major job opportunity, making Siobhan feel even more insecure. Cheri is also a factor in the triangle brewing down in the basement, although she doesn't know it -- she's been Smith's unrequited love interest for five years, despite the fact that their most meaningful exchange involved the weather. It's like "Friends," except these people aren't.
I was certain I knew halfway through how both situations would resolve, but I was only half-right. Still, I walked away satisfied, and still, the book had its own forward momentum towards its inevitable conclusion. The one criticism I would have of this book is that two of the characters -- Smith and Cheri -- were severely underdeveloped. Throughout the book, you get long stretches of the perspectives of the other four principals, but almost nothing of these two. In Cheri, I can see the beginnings of Delilah from Thirtynothing. But Delilah was a human being. Cheri is all cold, deadly, selfish beauty and nothing more. Smith? He's just nothing. We learn little of him other than that he's a banker, has been carrying on this fantasy affair with Cheri for five years, and has been friends with Ralph since high school.
But, hey. Jewell was just starting out with this book. Since then, her books have gotten better, her plots have gotten more creative, and her characters have gotten deeper and more original. All of her successive books are crammed to the gills with interesting folk, who have big dreams, make stupid mistakes, and who you ultimately want to see happy. I can forgive a couple of cardboard cut-outs in her first time out. I just hope she's working on something new now!
In the case of Lisa Jewell, the last, quite randomly, happened to be the first. Ralph's Party was the novel she wrote on a bet, after losing the last in a succession of shitty jobs, and it launched her career.
The book deals with similar themes as most of her other books. Volumes and volumes have been written about the frothy, initial venture into adulthood, which usually winds up looking more like a kid's version of adulthood accompanied by a shitty job. But it seems that there's less about exploring the second phase of adulthood, the one which involves mortgages and babies and responsible jobs. Jewell's books deal with these themes, and with the inherent conflicts and ambivalence that often accompany these life decisions. Many of her characters have a sort of creative and bohemian bent, and don't want to become their parents. Yet, they realize they're getting a bit old to rent grungy apartments, stay out drinking all night, and indulge in random hookups.
Most of these conflicts have a satisfactory, if not totally happy, resolution in Jewell's books. Ralph's Party is no exception. The twin plots in the book are loosely bound together by the fact that the principals all live in the same apartment building. In the basement, the rivaly-friendship of stuffed-shirt Smith and freewheeling artist Ralph is shaken when they acquire a pretty female flatmate named Jem. Above them, long-term couple Siobhan and Karl and trying to sort out their future. Siobhan has not worked in a while, has put on weight, and is feeling at loose ends, old and unattractive. Karl, although still very attracted to his girlfriend, has had an utterly meaningless affair with Cheri from the top floor. His life has also changed with a major job opportunity, making Siobhan feel even more insecure. Cheri is also a factor in the triangle brewing down in the basement, although she doesn't know it -- she's been Smith's unrequited love interest for five years, despite the fact that their most meaningful exchange involved the weather. It's like "Friends," except these people aren't.
I was certain I knew halfway through how both situations would resolve, but I was only half-right. Still, I walked away satisfied, and still, the book had its own forward momentum towards its inevitable conclusion. The one criticism I would have of this book is that two of the characters -- Smith and Cheri -- were severely underdeveloped. Throughout the book, you get long stretches of the perspectives of the other four principals, but almost nothing of these two. In Cheri, I can see the beginnings of Delilah from Thirtynothing. But Delilah was a human being. Cheri is all cold, deadly, selfish beauty and nothing more. Smith? He's just nothing. We learn little of him other than that he's a banker, has been carrying on this fantasy affair with Cheri for five years, and has been friends with Ralph since high school.
But, hey. Jewell was just starting out with this book. Since then, her books have gotten better, her plots have gotten more creative, and her characters have gotten deeper and more original. All of her successive books are crammed to the gills with interesting folk, who have big dreams, make stupid mistakes, and who you ultimately want to see happy. I can forgive a couple of cardboard cut-outs in her first time out. I just hope she's working on something new now!
Friday, October 30, 2009
Black Death
I said that I'd thoroughly enjoyed People of the Book, and was looking forward to reading more of Geraldine Brooks, so I picked up Year of Wonders the last time I was downtown.
The first thing I noticed about it was that it had been beaten to hell. That's usually a good sign in library books. Crinkled cover, limp spine, coffee and tea stains throughout, it usually means that it's been well-loved. I could see why.
The book is set in England in 1666 and based on the true story of a small English village that saw an outbreak of the plague. After it became clear that the epidemic had visited their doorstep, the villagers made the striking and courageous decision to barricade themselves in. A local earl left provisions for them at the town's Boundary Stone so they wouldn't starve. Anyone with a special need would leave a note (or in the case of the illiterate, a small sample of what they had run out of)and money.
The effects of an epidemic on society continue to fascinate people. In this story, told through the eyes of the minister's servant Anna, you see acts of heroism, acts of greed, of violence and fear, of kindness and courage. To be sure, there's lots of nasty stuff in this book. There's a hanging, a death from exposure after an individual was fixed to a post with a knife through his hands, a near-drowning of an infant, a near-death in childbirth, and I left out some of the more disgusting things that turn out to be central elements to the plot.
Speaking of which...that's one of the best parts of this book. The basic outcome is pretty much a forgone conclusion. The plague wiped out around 20% of London's population that year, and in the historic Eyam, the death toll was more like 75%. Yet, it has a forward momentum of its own. You keep turning the pages to see what's going to happen, even though you already sort of know. The characters are strong and intriguing, even if the narrator is a bit cliched. Just once, I'd love to read a book set in the Middle Ages or Colonial America narrated by a woman who does NOT have a keen mind and love for learning uncharacteristic of women of her time.
But if Anna gets on your nerves at all, there are lots of other people in this book. The ancient herbalist woman and her niece, who live at the edge of town and are called on whenever there's an illness or a childbirth. Anna's drunken, no-good father and stepmother. The strong, determined minister and his equally compassionate, determined wife. Anna's lodger, the sexy and clever tailor who brought the doom to the village. The orphaned Quaker girl with nothing to her name except a lead mine, which is in danger of being poached and claimed until Anna and the minister's wife heroically intervene.
One aspect of the books I read that I rarely mention is the language itself. I guess it's because language is a bit like sound design for a movie: when it's well-done, you generally don't even notice it's there at all. This is sort of a different case, though. It's hard for modern writers to get the linguistic feel for the way people talked long ago. Some writers choose to avoid the issue and just write it "straight." Others make it sound too stiff and flowery, so that you have a small-town servant talking like Shakespeare. Brooks found a good balance. The villagers' voices are down to earth, yet they use words in their old sense. Brooks even employs some no-longer-heard slang (it took me most of the book to realize that "choused" is a word sort of similar to "cheated" or "tricked.")
All in all, I reccomend Year of Wonders. I even forgive its rather off-the-wall ending. The book raises still-pertinent questions of what it means to live in a society and how far one's duty to one's neighbors extends. Each villager, in the Year of Wonders, finds his or her own answer, but none are without consequences.
The first thing I noticed about it was that it had been beaten to hell. That's usually a good sign in library books. Crinkled cover, limp spine, coffee and tea stains throughout, it usually means that it's been well-loved. I could see why.
The book is set in England in 1666 and based on the true story of a small English village that saw an outbreak of the plague. After it became clear that the epidemic had visited their doorstep, the villagers made the striking and courageous decision to barricade themselves in. A local earl left provisions for them at the town's Boundary Stone so they wouldn't starve. Anyone with a special need would leave a note (or in the case of the illiterate, a small sample of what they had run out of)and money.
The effects of an epidemic on society continue to fascinate people. In this story, told through the eyes of the minister's servant Anna, you see acts of heroism, acts of greed, of violence and fear, of kindness and courage. To be sure, there's lots of nasty stuff in this book. There's a hanging, a death from exposure after an individual was fixed to a post with a knife through his hands, a near-drowning of an infant, a near-death in childbirth, and I left out some of the more disgusting things that turn out to be central elements to the plot.
Speaking of which...that's one of the best parts of this book. The basic outcome is pretty much a forgone conclusion. The plague wiped out around 20% of London's population that year, and in the historic Eyam, the death toll was more like 75%. Yet, it has a forward momentum of its own. You keep turning the pages to see what's going to happen, even though you already sort of know. The characters are strong and intriguing, even if the narrator is a bit cliched. Just once, I'd love to read a book set in the Middle Ages or Colonial America narrated by a woman who does NOT have a keen mind and love for learning uncharacteristic of women of her time.
But if Anna gets on your nerves at all, there are lots of other people in this book. The ancient herbalist woman and her niece, who live at the edge of town and are called on whenever there's an illness or a childbirth. Anna's drunken, no-good father and stepmother. The strong, determined minister and his equally compassionate, determined wife. Anna's lodger, the sexy and clever tailor who brought the doom to the village. The orphaned Quaker girl with nothing to her name except a lead mine, which is in danger of being poached and claimed until Anna and the minister's wife heroically intervene.
One aspect of the books I read that I rarely mention is the language itself. I guess it's because language is a bit like sound design for a movie: when it's well-done, you generally don't even notice it's there at all. This is sort of a different case, though. It's hard for modern writers to get the linguistic feel for the way people talked long ago. Some writers choose to avoid the issue and just write it "straight." Others make it sound too stiff and flowery, so that you have a small-town servant talking like Shakespeare. Brooks found a good balance. The villagers' voices are down to earth, yet they use words in their old sense. Brooks even employs some no-longer-heard slang (it took me most of the book to realize that "choused" is a word sort of similar to "cheated" or "tricked.")
All in all, I reccomend Year of Wonders. I even forgive its rather off-the-wall ending. The book raises still-pertinent questions of what it means to live in a society and how far one's duty to one's neighbors extends. Each villager, in the Year of Wonders, finds his or her own answer, but none are without consequences.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The Hook Brings You Back
Something I’ve been thinking about lately: “What words/phrases in a blurb make a book irresistible? What words/phrases will make you put the book back down immediately?”
It's hard to think of too many that make a book immediately irresistible, but I can think of a few that make books very resistable. "Confronting the past," for example. Or "confronting demons," or confronting pretty much anything while in the process of doing something else. Anything that looks overly dolorous, or as if it was inspired by an episode of Oprah, I avoid. For example, books on the effect of a child's death on a couple's marriage.
It's changed a bit as I've gotten older, too. For instance, I used to eat up books about young women making their way in the world with a big spoon. Devil Wears Prada, The Second Assistant, Citizen Girl, I read them all. I started to sour on them after that last one, which is still my ultimate example of a bad book aimed at women. After a while, they started to depress me, and make me feel old and curmudgeonly. Is no one teaching these kids that they have to start at the bottom? Why are these kids so entitled and self-centered? And why won't they get off my lawn?
What can always intrigue me is a book about something outside the ordinary realm of most people's experiences. I'm not talking about books about other cultures. They're just living their lives, too. Books like Sarah Bird's The Flamenco School, or the odd upbringing of the twins in The Thirteenth Tale. I like books where it's clear that the author has really used his or her imagination.
But I guess I also don't take blurbs too seriously. I skim them to get a general sense of what the book's going to be about, and then I go from there.
Monday, October 26, 2009
A Life in Obscurity
Sometimes, the most interesting biographical subjects are those that are relatively obscure. Such is the case with the strange and amazing life of piano prodigy Ervin Nyiregyhazi (pronounced Neer-edge-hah-zee), chronicled in Lost Genius: The Curious and True Story of an Extraordinary Musical Talent by Kevin Bazzana.
Nyiregyhazi was born in 1903, in Hungary. He was an extraordinary piano talent, and his social-climbing parents were quick to cash in. Like Mozart before him and Micahel Jackson after, he was paraded around, held to a grueling performance schedule and forced to be the primary support of the family. And like both men, it messed him up, too. It wasn't just all the attention at an early age, but the weird dichotomy of his expected behavior: in some respects, he had to be absolutely adult. If he was scared before a performance, he wasn't supposed to hide or cry; if he didn't want to perform, he wasn't allowed to back out. But his marketability lay in the very fact of him being a child. His mother made him wear long hair and short pants years after social norms dictated that he dress in a more adult fashion. She forbade him from doing much of anything other than practicing, and the forbidden activities ran the gamut from chess to sex. Astonishingly, he was fifteen when he learned the most basic facts about where babies came from and the differences between male and female bodies.
With this odd upbringing, which combined overprotection with exploitation, it's no wonder he grew up screwed up. From his parents, he learned that he was special, a genius, an aristocrat, and entitled to the best. Yet he was so sheltered that he had almost no resources to guarantee his own future. He was taken advantage of by various women, and by unscrupulous and incompetent managers. He crumbled under the slightest criticism, developed terribly anxiety and paranoia, but never lost his taste for finer things or his huge sexual appetite. He married ten times, had numerous long-term affairs, and frequented brothels the way most people frequent grocery stores.
But always, there was the music. Often, he didn't want to perform, and often, the public didn't want him, but it was always a part of his life. He was a prolific composer as well as performer, and wrote pieces based on the most mundane experiences ("The Installation of the Telephone," for example). Nyiregyhazi came of age when the worth of Liszt and Grieg was still being hotly debated, when it was possible to shock audiences with performaces of classical music, and these chapters particularly intrigued me. His brief renaissance, in the late 1970s, was not so much an effort at recognition as at preservation of a "last voice from a bygone era." In hearing his playing, people believed they were listening to the last of the Romantic-era pianists.
As interesting as his life was, the book could be dull at times. I'm not sure whether it's the fault of the biographer or not, but Nyiregyhazi's personality never fully jumps off the page. He ultimately passes the Maxwell Perkins test -- by the end of the book, you would indeed know him if you met him on the street, and know how to respond -- but it takes a long while to get there. And a large portion of his life was simply not that interesting. Petty scraping to get by, life in cheap hotels, staying indoors and eating at rotten coffee shops (as long as they don't play Muzak!) is not really the stuff of great literature. It's really the bookends of Nyiregyhazi's life that are interesting: his bizarre childhood, and his unlikely renaissance at the end of his life. Most of his ten marriages aren't even that interesting.
Still, if you like classical music, this one's worth a read. And if you like sad Hollywood stories about faded stars, this one's also worth a read, for it gives sort of an inside view of how one can wind up there, even without excessive chemical assistance.
Nyiregyhazi was born in 1903, in Hungary. He was an extraordinary piano talent, and his social-climbing parents were quick to cash in. Like Mozart before him and Micahel Jackson after, he was paraded around, held to a grueling performance schedule and forced to be the primary support of the family. And like both men, it messed him up, too. It wasn't just all the attention at an early age, but the weird dichotomy of his expected behavior: in some respects, he had to be absolutely adult. If he was scared before a performance, he wasn't supposed to hide or cry; if he didn't want to perform, he wasn't allowed to back out. But his marketability lay in the very fact of him being a child. His mother made him wear long hair and short pants years after social norms dictated that he dress in a more adult fashion. She forbade him from doing much of anything other than practicing, and the forbidden activities ran the gamut from chess to sex. Astonishingly, he was fifteen when he learned the most basic facts about where babies came from and the differences between male and female bodies.
With this odd upbringing, which combined overprotection with exploitation, it's no wonder he grew up screwed up. From his parents, he learned that he was special, a genius, an aristocrat, and entitled to the best. Yet he was so sheltered that he had almost no resources to guarantee his own future. He was taken advantage of by various women, and by unscrupulous and incompetent managers. He crumbled under the slightest criticism, developed terribly anxiety and paranoia, but never lost his taste for finer things or his huge sexual appetite. He married ten times, had numerous long-term affairs, and frequented brothels the way most people frequent grocery stores.
But always, there was the music. Often, he didn't want to perform, and often, the public didn't want him, but it was always a part of his life. He was a prolific composer as well as performer, and wrote pieces based on the most mundane experiences ("The Installation of the Telephone," for example). Nyiregyhazi came of age when the worth of Liszt and Grieg was still being hotly debated, when it was possible to shock audiences with performaces of classical music, and these chapters particularly intrigued me. His brief renaissance, in the late 1970s, was not so much an effort at recognition as at preservation of a "last voice from a bygone era." In hearing his playing, people believed they were listening to the last of the Romantic-era pianists.
As interesting as his life was, the book could be dull at times. I'm not sure whether it's the fault of the biographer or not, but Nyiregyhazi's personality never fully jumps off the page. He ultimately passes the Maxwell Perkins test -- by the end of the book, you would indeed know him if you met him on the street, and know how to respond -- but it takes a long while to get there. And a large portion of his life was simply not that interesting. Petty scraping to get by, life in cheap hotels, staying indoors and eating at rotten coffee shops (as long as they don't play Muzak!) is not really the stuff of great literature. It's really the bookends of Nyiregyhazi's life that are interesting: his bizarre childhood, and his unlikely renaissance at the end of his life. Most of his ten marriages aren't even that interesting.
Still, if you like classical music, this one's worth a read. And if you like sad Hollywood stories about faded stars, this one's also worth a read, for it gives sort of an inside view of how one can wind up there, even without excessive chemical assistance.
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