Mediavolo is a band like no other. Based in Brest, France, they offer insight into the human condition with honest and patient attention. Back in 2014, I interviewed core members Géraldine Le Cocq and Jacques Henry, adding my own throughts on their discography as it then stood. Away Within is their first full-length release since that time, and I was recently honored to write the liner notes for it. The album is available on Bandcamp here. Once you dive in, you’ll never go back…
Normally, when fire burns, its smoke rises to become one with the sky. The smoke of WAZAMBA settles inward to become one with the self. This deeply resinous masterpiece from Parfum d’Empire opens with a kiss of red apple before fingernails of Moroccan cypress and aldehydes scratch ever so lightly along the nape of our awareness. There’s no escaping its allure; no matter where you turn, its sillage follows with the gentle persistence of a shadow.
Kenyan myrrh, olibanum, labdanum, and plum create an echo chamber that feels prayerful in its intimacy. Thus, the experience of this perfume becomes more individual the more it develops. Like a song, it reveals its chorus after the opening verses—a comfort to return to as we move throughout the day, revealing new shades of meaning.
Base notes of Somali incense (a sagacious presence throughout), fir balsam absolute, Ethiopian opoponax, Indian sandalwood, and fern wrap the skin in the vibrations of time travel, stepping beyond the here and now to take in the scents of places long buried and yet to be built. Uncannily enough, it makes us feel as if we were the portal rather than the ones stepping through it, absorbing the world around us so as not to forget it.
Behind WAZAMBA is the nose of Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, whose approach to the sacred crosses as many borders as the ingredients that come together in its glorious ritual. By harmonizing such seemingly disparate elements and cultures, he creates a warmth that melts snow into rivers. It is lesson that anyone with a political agenda might learn from, exhaling the will to power and inhaling a desire to know oneself again as a child of God.
Little-t “trauma” operates by a different MO from big-T “Trauma.” Throughout You Know What You Did, the debut thriller from K. T. Nguyen, we are pulled between the two in a narrative balancing act of such agility as to leave us en pointe at their intersection on every page.
Artist, mother, and wife Annie Shaw is more than this trifecta lets on. Living in suburban Virginia with her husband Duncan and their daughter Tabitha, she has buttered the bread of her life on both sides. And yet, molding between them is a sandwich of reruns involving incidents she would much rather forget. Dead bodies, bloodied hands, and other morbid highlights make us wonder just how much Annie may be capable of when her thoughts are allowed to roam. But roam is all they can do under the medication she takes to corral her OCD, which operates by its own rules of contamination that must be taken seriously whenever they jump the fence.
Haunted by thoughts of her mother, whose death is a leak in her otherwise airtight self-presentation, Annie sinks her canines into the absence as if something to devour in one bite. She worries what the authorities might think were they to scrutinize her magazine-worthy home (at one point described as a “Pinterest board come to life”), let alone the immaterial desires living under its roof. Above all, she fears herself.
We learn that Annie’s parents came from war-torn Vietnam to start afresh in the States. Yet the story of this turnaround is a myth to which she has grown apathetic. She lets the minds of those she encounters fill in its gaps with American grit and self-determination as an excuse to ignore their complicity in a genocide padded by hindsight. Wrapped in layers of denial, her heritage avoids the tip of the proverbial tongue like a cherry tomato dodges the prongs of the salad eater’s fork.
Lest we tokenize her emotional inheritance like the rest, Nguyen reminds us of just how broken everyone in Annie’s circle is. Duncan carries his own PTSD from as a Pulitzer-winning military field reporter. His refusal to talk about his work speaks of a silence inaccessible to Annie, who is constantly being forced to reveal her innermost thoughts, ever the one to “smooth things over.” The novel’s happiest people are those who have trained themselves in the art of looking the other way.
And so, when her long-time art patron goes missing, Annie starts to unravel, slipping down drains of thought that may or may not be her own. Throughout this storm of possibilities, refrains rear themselves. Whether in the rising temperatures of her showers (which seem to be her only solace) or in the admonitions of a mind in turmoil, she gives in to speculation at the risk of harm. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that said patron always says Annie’s name twice (“Anh Le, Anh Le”) or that her long-haired dachshund should be named Deja, implying that even the most indeterminate circumstances might be born of rehearsal.
In childhood flashbacks, we witness an upbringing tessellated with white squares of affirmation and black squares of a mother whose decline begets abuse. When everything in Annie begins to hurt, we realize she has always been in pain, but the extent of it is only clarifying itself now. After decades of Mother opening wounds and Daughter suturing them, the latter is left wondering who will supply the thread when it runs out.
Meanwhile, the rough patches are spreading. Annie takes compliments wherever she can get them. Upon meeting a handsome stranger, she relishes seeing herself in his eyes, as perfect as anyone can be in that blush of unfamiliarity before the truth sets in. But flowing through those endorphins is a curse, a toggle by which the internal bad and external good may switch places at any moment. Annie may be a “master of creating worlds,” but she can barely hold the seams of her own.
With adroit control over tension, Nguyen keeps us in check, even when we only have one foot in the circle of certainty. As the kinetic ending snaps everything into focus, we begin to question our allegiances to mental (in)stability, collective trauma, and self-made idealism.
While no one is innocent, that’s perhaps as it should be. We are all vagabonds from something: our pasts, our ancestors, our very selves. If anything, the moral gray areas in which these characters live confirm the messiness of the mundane. Thus, the biggest crimes are those committed in the everyday. Whether it’s Annie’s admission to hiding behind her husband’s privilege or a friend’s nonchalant acquiescence to infidelity, in each of these indiscretions floats a keyhole waiting to unleash the floodgates of sin—a painful yet necessary reminder that no war ever ends because the soul is a battlefield on which blood never dries.
You Know What You Did is available from Dutton in April 2024.
to name something is
to know it
So writes Kimberly Nguyen in the opening poem of her visceral collection, Here I Am Burn Me. And yet, what becomes increasingly clear, page after blood-rimmed page, is that to name something can also be to unknow it—further to destroy it, colonize it, and erase its origins in favor of a master narrative. Nguyen bends that master narrative until it whitens, cracks, and snaps. Rather than rebuild something from those screaming fragments, she turns her back on their hollow breath to inhale a light fashioned in hands washed clean of their conspiracy. She rids herself not only of grime but also of the expectations placed upon her shoulders, already bruised from decades of trauma compressed into the occasional period. This is what she hears.
what’s the difference between war and its aftermath
A question without a question mark becomes a statement of truth. Such linguistic “errors” are highlighted throughout as markers of identity (or lack thereof), even as the tides of history crash against the shores of a geography one can never understand from a distance. Nguyen resists the water and flavors her soul with the salt that makes it fatal to drink yet life-giving to all else. Her voice echoes in bones and eyelids, earlobes and fingernails, ink and cane pulp. In the same breath, that yearning for water becomes explicitly self-defeating—a womb-like existence tempered by the enforcement of maritime mythologies. No matter how landbound we are, the threat of drowning is omnipresent. Thus, the act of writing is never unsubmerged but always subject to the same curling of contaminants. This is what she sees.
violence is not a language
we were born with
Our faith is demonstrated only by the object to which we stitch the threads of our fallible professions. We might have the fullest confidence in thin ice, yet we will fall through it to our deaths; we might have no assurance in thick ice yet make it to the other side without incident. Violence flips this dynamic. Men in suits and other forms of camouflage have confidence in the weapons they worship, some of which far exceed their expectations for destruction. Meanwhile, those coerced into deploying them tremble so that their bodies force an error when training grounds resolve into battlefields. Fire and flame are equal partners in this elemental give and take, each a reflection of the other from night to day and back again. Likewise, every tongue has a sharp side and a dull side, and in her vacillation between the two, Nguyen plants her feet firmly in the squish of their overlap. Shooting down every word traversing that slick surface before it can escape is laborious. This is what she tastes.
i’ll be the one-line poem you take a black marker to,
black out all the parts of me you don’t want to see
In the same way that some of these poems are footnotes, sprinkling their dead skin into places where primary content should never be relegated, Nguyen also sinks her teeth into science, physics, astronomy, and other subcutaneous layers of knowledge. Others are transmissions from outer space to inner, and vice versa. Still others are bifurcated, a conversation with the self, curling in a three-dimensional analogy of a four-dimensional dilemma. Behind closed eyelids, we encounter flashes of war, of Agent Orange, of fields ablaze, of eyebrows singed, of journeys interrupted, of soldiers remembered, of weaponry impossible to forget. And while communing with ghosts may be a privilege her father will not share, it is something she offers us maternally, sustaining the crossfire to lay it at our feet. This is what she smells.
a soft place for a sharp word to land
Rarely has such an apt description of the itinerant body been articulated. While the privileged among us spin a globe, close our eyes, and travel to wherever our finger lands, hers get tangled in a blur of ideologies, raking through cities, forests, and oceans as if they were nothing more than the topography of some enormous beast. Cuts and lesions allow navigation in darkness when torches fail to give up their ghosts. Snow is now skin, picked and collected as a record of self-harm as if to prove one’s aliveness by testing the body’s limits. This is what she touches.
you can love a plant and it can still wilt away
Grief is only the conscious delaying of one’s own demise, a reminder that every canon depends on death. The only way to heal an emotional wound is to scribble it out and write another one in its place, ad infinitum. In a world that feeds on lies, killing is the truest act, or so the powers that be would have us believe. Such is the script we follow to ensure success, living out dreams as if they were real, only to realize too late that everything we ever experienced happened to someone else. If a sixth sense is to be found amid the bramble through which we have been dragged, it is knowing that love is not a badge of honor but the thickest scab protecting us from further harm. Thank you, Kimberly, for tracing its contours with such care. We need more of this.
Here I Am Burn Me is available from Write Bloody here.
For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light,
lest his deeds should be reproved.
–John 3:20
Rudd is a fractured boy. Like a mirror thrown to the ground and glued back together, he splits the reckoning of anyone who looks into his eyes beyond the comfort of recognition. To the other kids at school, he is a non-entity. To his mother, he is a “vague and lifeless avatar of Mormon ideals.” To himself, he is someone else, a candle flickering at the lips of a force he struggles to define. While some of this dissociation may be attributable to the angst and ennui any teenager might experience after years of ostracization, much of it links to dark corner pieces in the greater puzzle of who he may or may not be.
Words and phrases run circles in his head, each a temporary fixation leaving a permanent scar in the body envelope of his upbringing. “Everything was humiliating but desperately needed,” the narrator observes, thus framing Rudd as a soul whose identity is necessarily suspect by default. It’s as if the religious life promised by the local community were not so much a lie as an alternative truth by which the stitches of his coming of age are constantly pulled out and retied, pulled out and retied. Over time, this cycle of disinterest in the things of faith leaves him wandering in cold denial.
Rudd’s father is dead—suicide, we learn—and the legacy of that inherited family trauma is just now beginning to undress itself in the glare of young adulthood. This is perhaps why, one day, he finds himself rummaging through the deceased parent’s effects. Among them is a letter from his mistress, whose handwriting is barely legible in its faded state (a sign, perhaps, of its need for resolution). Cryptic phrases like “duty in your flesh” and other information hint at a half-brother named Lael, whose existence comes as a quiet shock.
Rudd’s mother is disinterested in digging up the past. “We know the truth,” she avers; case closed. And yet, Rudd demands to know about this extramarital son, to which she replies: “The only bastard around here is you, and you weren’t born that way. You had to grow into it.” And with that, his quest for family leads him to Lael, who shares his apathy.
In the midst of developing a connection with the sibling he never knew, Rudd becomes aware of his power. “Lael could leak into him,” we are told, “but not he into Lael,” setting a precedent for a dynamic that only intensifies with time. While working on a research project for school, Rudd peels away a layer of resistance from the onion that is Lael. He learns about William Hooper Young, the grandson of Brigham Young convicted of murdering a young woman in the name of “blood atonement,” an obscure and recanted Mormon tradition that provided soul retribution through the killing of those who had sinned so egregiously that the redemption of Christ was deemed insufficient. The deeper he gets into this history, the more he feels it to be inchoate in his connection with Lael. Even the latter knows school projects are vanity metrics designed to keep students busy and instructors feeling self-righteous: “Teaching’s not about truth. It’s about comfort.”
Curtains appear throughout the novel. Whether Rudd is looking through them at an inner part of himself in moments of reflection or being told to reach through them in a secret temple ritual, described in painful detail in the book’s second section, they are omnipresent. At their whim, Rudd catches only glimpses of events in which he may or may not have participated, including exhuming his father’s corpse, flirting with the identity of William Hooper Young, and beginning to see value in the blood sacrifice. (“God has drawn a curtain between myself and heaven,” he admits, “and there is no parting it.”) But the more he falls into bouts of missing time to the point of surviving a crime so heinous that his memory of it is as indefinite as his possible involvement in it, the more holes acquire an intimate significance. Holes in memory, space, and time speak in chorus of the porosity of lived reality.
In a bravado third act, do-overs and attempts at refashioning memory, space, and time serve as a baseline for getting away with abuse and possibly worse. And yet, we get the feeling that in a town of such limited means (as attested by the upside-down “L” that serves as a “7” in the elementary school’s marquee), the only thing one can hope for is to slip through the fingers of accountability.
Ultimately, it is violence that connects these characters (some of whom I am at pains to reveal without spoiling the plot) and the religion that holds their lives together on the shakiest of outstretched palms. Only when they come to themselves do they realize just how far the feet of their self-justification have traveled in search of asylum. Any hope we might pine for is tempered by the novel’s mission statement: “These painful moments of lucidity, an affliction. What can we do but wait for them to pass?” And so, we stand in the shadow of our allegiances, but whether or not we question our complicity in what we’ve just read is another question entirely. Only you can answer that for yourself.
The Open Curtain is available from Coffee House Press and fine booksellers.
It is often said that fragrances transport us. Indeed, some of my favorites—including Parfum d’Empire’s Wazamba, Jazeel’s Heyam, and the Incense Series by Commes des Garçons—have more than a resinous quality in common. Each is also intimately connected to the spirit of a place, whether in the regional specificity of its note profile (such as Wazamba’s Afrocentric symphony of ingredients from Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Morocco) or by force of suggestion in the name. Al Andalus checks off those boxes and then some. What puts this masterpiece from the Italian house of Moresque and the nose of Andrea “Thero” Casotti on its own pedestal is the inwardness it affords the moment I apply it. Never have I beheld a scent that pulls such a vivid constellation of time and place into me rather than me into it.
As the opening release of ginger embraces my nostrils like an old friend, it bears saffron and black pepper as gifts from afar. Despite the connotations of distances traveled, “exotic” and other outdated descriptors must go straight into the kitsch bin, making way for the more accurate word pictures of “bitingly warm” and “darkly gold-flecked.” The brocade of light and shadow that plays about its introduction is extraordinary. It changes during every inhalation—so much so that I wish I didn’t have to exhale in between.
As the hands on the clock go obtuse, then acute, a quiet comfort takes over. A heart of oud from Kalimantan Island shines like a candle in a blackout—which is to say, with unadulterated vitality. The slightest breaths of wind remind me of where this reunion began, hinting at slumber. Memories and stories lure my attention from the present while enhancing bodily awareness.
Tendrils of Haitian vetiver, French labdanum, and birch braid themselves until two become one, leaving a bed of wonder that smells of the soul. Only then do I realize I’ve been speaking to myself the whole time, curling inside out.
How appropriate, then, that Al Andalus should last 12 hours. Its diurnal character shifts from golds to greens throughout the day, foreshadowing the night with its sunlit opening. What begins with the excitement of an open-air market gradually turns dusky, becoming a scent for the skin within. Such an experience is rare in perfumery, and yet, here it awaits, a sky without a cloud but for the wisp of smoke in whose name it settles.
Between the covers of BIRD, Christina Rauh Fishburne offers a chapbook of moving images and emotional tableaux using words as her pigment and a keen sense of observation as her brush. Her prose poems are stories just beginning to petal open in the light of a reader’s eyes, each as fragrant with densely packed information as a human cell.
The scenes are as distinct as the verses describing them. While there are plenty of aerial views to take in, Fishburne dives ever inward as the pages flip by. From a scarecrow-stuck field and private garden to a dressing room and mollusk’s shell, she combines just enough ingredients to make a meal of the lesson at hand and consume it before moving on to the next.
Personalities plant their stakes along the way. Whether in the crow’s stark altruism, the albatross’s maritime legacy, or the barn owl’s untranslatable scream, the indifference of bare life to examined life renders our concerns at once universal and meaningless. This doesn’t mean we are always looking through nonhuman eyes; it does mean we are asked to consider how that gnaws at the ego.
Whereas impossibilities feel organic (“The sun was still and straight as a cowboy”), renderings of the quotidian and the agricultural (there is, for example, repeated mention of barley) feel starkly out of place, as if nature were only a construction of those who infringe upon it with the cutting of blades, the striking of matches, and the pulling of roots.
While the mood is generally retrospective, sometimes regretful, a certain resilience shines through with mounting clarity. Even darker passages like “Pheasant” embalm a youthful wonder that never seems to burnish. “Oyster Catcher” is a masterstroke of parental anxieties (“My child will be born quite soon. I receive her messages in sudden desperate grasping. She must be like me. She doesn’t like to be inside”) and confinement. In it, the pearl—for us, a sign of beauty and value—is a natural irritant, a bauble of sacrifice and forced honor that never quite reflects the visage of its wearer.
Signposting our journey are four “takes” on the gull. Their encounters with wounded yet resilient souls court the temptation to exaggerate or revise personal narratives. Fishburne continually seeks such hypocrisies, throwing intimate spotlights on them to ward us away. Elemental touchpoints also throw the occasional roof over our heads. Of these, “Water” gets at the heart of the collection’s worship of transfiguration. We take a lot of turns together yet come out the other end with scars to show for our survival.
The animal, insofar as it reflects the human, has more self-awareness and investment in the world than we might think. The human, insofar as it reflects the animal, loses itself in rote survival. “There’s nothing worse than a flightless bird,” Fishburne tells us, giving us hope to build wings of our own from the scraps of lived experience.
Bird is available directly from Kattywompus Press here.
In chapter 3 of Genesis, Satan makes his first cameo. By that point, God has commanded Adam to eat freely of every tree in the garden, with one proviso: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Appearing as a serpent, Satan approaches Eve instead, echoing those fateful words on his forked tongue, “Yea, hath God said, ‘Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’” So begins a chain of doubts and deceptions, tethering itself eventually to Father of Lies, the first novel by Brian Evenson.
Eldon Fochs is base but not basic. As a provost representing the local “Bloodite” Mormons, he commands respect, trust, and honor within his community. Yet the serpent’s voice rings in his ears like the vibrations of an empty skull. Empty is the operative word to describe Fochs, who serves as a willing vessel for that most ancient of mariners, steering the flesh into one fatal port of call before the winds of protection fluff his sails onward to the next.
Monitoring his disembodied crew of “loud thoughts”—not voices, he insists—is therapist Alexander Feshtig, at whose urging he unravels some of the fray of his childhood, passing off acts of violence as “dreams” and lightening his dark load in the face of uncertain accountability. Feshtig’s notes and battle of letters with his superiors (all of whom have a stake in keeping allegations of child abuse and murder under wraps), along with Fochs’s self-indulgent accounts in the first person, make for a morbid compass, the magnetic north of which points directly to the alter ego Fochs calls “Bloody-Head.” The latter’s interventions guide him into territories so wicked that he cannot help but come full circle into correction—or so he tells himself whenever the quotidian world seems poised to catch up with his perversions. Bloody-Head is neither a consequence of dissociative disturbances nor a projection of internal desires. He is, instead, the great tempter whose name and visage have been rendered for millennia on rock walls, stretched canvases, and human skin. And once he’s settled, no one dictates how long he can stay.
As a character study, Evenson’s narrative is a half-step removed from lived experience. His debut short story collection, Altmann’s Tongue (1994), prompted a critical response from his own Mormon leaders, who felt its frank sexual and thematic material went against the grain of doctrinal propriety. Refusing to succumb to their pressure to stop writing, he left a teaching job at Brigham Young University and the religious organization it represented. Although the seed of Father of Lies was already planted, this turn of events seems to have provided the increase. Here, he returns to those broken pieces, scrutinizing them in the light of retrospection and fashioning a catharsis of fiercely intimate proportion.
Seeing how far the church will gladly protect Fochs, lying to avoid soiling the undergarments of the Faith, hits close to home for me, too, as a survivor of spiritual abuse. When Fochs insists, “I know sin inside and out,” I believe him, if only because he is able to engage in that most horrific of illusions whereby he simultaneously swerves the wheels of innocent lives into oncoming traffic and sits behind the headlights that blind them moments before death.
Turning the secret into the sacred—or, if you prefer, treating the wrong as if it were right—is the only method of forgiveness by which Fochs can operate. Every killing is a “favor” to save a wandering sheep from reprobation, an act of such profound sacrifice that only a man of his supposed courage can bury the conscience so deep that its voice is muffled beyond recognition. And even when flowers of truth begin to bud from the rot, they are robbed of their fragrance before being given a chance to bloom. Thus, Fochs’s place on Earth is assured by the dint of a metaphysical contract. He knows his destination. Might as well destroy as many lives as possible on his way down. Feshtig puts it best: “Hell is crammed full of godly men.”
There’s no surprise in the ending, if only because we’ve seen it play out too many times in reality. The only spoiler here is Fochs, whose actions touch upon a sobering truth of the human experience: our addiction to crisis. Ignoring all the little (and not so little) signs that something is off gives us an excuse to swoop in as the savior when our complicity hits the proverbial fan. Therefore, what on the surface appears to be a slow burn of Mormonism soon forges a mirror in which we are asked to regard ourselves accordingly. Killing the body is one thing, killing the soul quite another—and how often we deny our readiness to flirt with that second sin!
The end effect of our time with Fochs is a scar. Whether in the anger one feels over the shuffling of apostolic cards or a child’s cry for salvation finding only the ears of her perpetrating father, the royal flush of revelation will abrade your heart as the conclusion lays its winning hand. After all, at the betting table of life, there’s nothing more frightening than a dealer who thinks himself righteous beyond reproach.
If fiction is the art of revivification, then let Mr. Beethoven be one of the most self-aware products of its wonders. The 2021 novel from Paul Griffiths grafts archival leaves to branches of nourishing speculation to imagine a journey the German composer might have taken in 1833 (six years after his death) to America to finish an oratorio on the Biblical figure of Job.
Although the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston indeed considered commissioning such a work, the only motif of it we will ever know may be articulated in the mind’s ear as we read of its stumbling fruition and premiere. Written in a narratively and stylistically episodic style and using only statements recorded as having been uttered by Der Spagnol, it unfolds not unlike his Ninth Symphony, building a dome’s worth of clouds one wisp at a time until the light of something divine pushes its way through to illuminate the ground at our feet anew.
If any of this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it’s too true to be good. Whereas the “real” Beethoven—as if the persona of that name weren’t already enigmatized by our constant recapitulations—reads to us today like the quintessential poète maudit, he marks the zoetrope of this book in moments of pandering frustration but also, more importantly, cadenzas of openheartedness, interpersonal profundity, and sheer delight.
Hints of a holistic portrait shade the opening act, wherein we encounter Beethoven as an enigma aboard a ship in the Atlantic bound for New England. He is a figure rendered by charcoal in intercontinental candlelight rather than oil in the Roman sun. “A stare, from a stranger,” we are told, “can be a flooding of humanity through whatever dams of difference.” Thus, we see and feel through the eyes of characters as fleeting as their target’s evergreen status. Such moments point to one of the novel’s most brilliant aggregations of historical impulse in Griffiths’s ability to articulate Beethoven before his place in the canon, itself in flux at this point, was assured by the validation of hindsight. By the same token, it emphasizes the unique disjointedness of place one experiences at sea before making landfall in realms of emotional economy. Says the muse of takeaways: Recognition is never universal.
By the time he gets to Boston, Beethoven’s dishevelment reads not like a caricature of the man but as the ravages of a harrowing journey. When encountering subsequent dramatis personae, we view them as he does: in his polite disinterest in Lowell Mason (responsible for the commission), in his enjoyment of Quincy under the auspices of hostess Mrs. Hannah Hill (a widow in whose company the bee legs of his heart collect no small amount of pollen), in his disappointment with the Reverend Ballou (a dismal librettist whose failures end up provoking a textual revival), and in his enchantment with Thankful (a sign language teacher and interpreter variously dubbed his “ear” and “amanuensis”). Every instance in which Herr Beethoven shakes a hand, exchanges words, or consumes a morsel of food reinforces the illusion that the music is imminent.
Each chapter is a composition unto itself. Whether in his iridescent vignette on the Fourth of July or in the careful construction of possible yet unprovable interactions, Griffiths sews his story with a leitmotif of concerns that make it clear he is wrestling as much as we are with the implications of his reality. While Chapter 32 is almost entirely footnotes, 33 only dialogue with dynamic markings, and 38 a single run-on sentence, these artifices never feel out of place or contrived. Each is a libretto unto itself for a musical work yet to be written.
From the selection of voices to travails with the local punditry, the story arc is pulled like a shuttle through looms marked by clefs instead of wooden frames, culminating in a virtuoso performance from musicians and Griffiths alike, as the author provides a full text for the oratorio, interleaved with reflections such as:
“To this Boston audience, the music is untoward, beyond familiar reference points, and yet at the same time wondrous, perhaps most of all in its successions of harmonies, how they float, swerve or dive while also proceeding forward inexorably, how they keep their sights on that one sure path while sometimes veering to the side or soaring high above, carrying their first listeners into new air.”
The book’s constant fourth-wall breaking may be its greatest pleasure. At one point, Griffiths even invites us to call him out on his conceit, only to retreat further into its fascinating depths. Hanging on what-might-have-beens (“it could all so easily have gone a different way,” “Scraps of paper might have survived,” etc.), he is content to vary his approach to the theme at hand as a seasoned improviser at the keyboard.
Among the many things to adore about Mr. Beethoven is that it sidesteps the trap of forcing a creative swoon. Unlike The Agony and the Ecstasy, whose Michelangelo rhapsodizes in the presence of unhewn marble, itself a cipher for escape, we get none of the romantic privilege of the artist at work. Hints of influences, witting or not, also make this a joyful effort. Top notes of James Cowan’s A Mapmaker’s Dream and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and a splash of Umberto Eco in the middle make way for a powerful dry down that leaves plenty of room for Griffiths’s base notes to settle in the nose for the long haul. In the latter vein, nods to his own work (“Let me tell you,” says Mrs. Hill at one point, naming his Ophelia novel) remind us of who is telling the story. Setting aside such comparisons leaves us with a three-dimensional object to regard in the light of our hopeful imaginations. The more we turn the key, the more it can sing when we let go.
Like the composer, we hear nothing yet feel every note.
Mr. Beethoven is available from New York Review Books (pictured below) for those in the U.S. or from Henningham Family Press (pictured above) for those in Europe.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 