A Story With Many Lives

Alice Munro wrote a story that was published in “The New Yorker” in 1997 entitled, “The Bear Went Over The Mountain.” Not long after the story was published, a young Canadian actress and screen writer, Sarah Polley, fell in love with the story and wanted to make it into a film. Sarah Polley made the story into a film called “Away From Her”, starring Julie Christie. Ms. Christie, after a long hiatus from film making, was nominated for best actress in 2007, for her role, as Fiona, in the film, “Away From Her”.

I read the "The Bear Went Over The Mountain" in The New Yorker a few years ago. Recently I purchased the novella, ”Away From Her”, not making the connection. As I began to read the story I realized that I had read it before. I usually don’t like to reread a story/book because I feel there are so many new books to read and discover. But, this is a memorable story and one that is more than worthwhile to reread.

Alice Munro is a prolific writer, who writes beautiful, lyrical prose. “Away From Her” is a story of love and marriage. The story is told from the viewpoint of Grant, the husband, a retired college professor, whose wife of over 30 years begins to lose her memory and drift away from him. Fiona is always the force behind Grant. When Fiona laughingly suggested to Grant that they get married, he said “Yes, yes!” because he wanted “never to be away from her.”

This is a story of a marriage and all the twists and turns that evolve over thirty years. Grant was a loving but often unfaithful husband. When he is forced to retire, Fiona and Grant move to her family’s isolated farmhouse. There Fiona begins to lose her sense of the past. They go together to see a (nursing) “home”. Fiona eventually settles into the routine of the home and Grant returns to their empty house. What follows describes the essence of love. Grant is dismayed when Fiona doesn’t recognize him. But, the ending of the story tells of a haunting act of selflessness and love committed by Grant. One that takes the reader by surprise. Reading Alice Munro is like watching an artist paint a picture. All the blurs and smudges (of the characters) evolve into in a work of art. Reading this haunting story gives the reader insight into why Sarah Polley was so obsessed with the story and wanted to share it with the world.

You can read the story from “The New Yorker,” at
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1999/12/27/1999_12_27_110_TNY_LIBRY_000019900

A Poet Among Us

Carolyn Hall is a gifted haiku poet in our midst, publishing and winning awards in haiku poetry competitions since she began writing in 1999. Although she has been writing and contributing to haiku publications for some time, Water Lines,  published in Great Britain by Snapshot Press in 2006, is her first individual collection.  It can be ordered online at http://snapshotpress.co.uk/orderonline_usd.htm.  Haiku is known to a few of us as a  brief poem containing nature imagery. Beyond that, the poems often reference a season and contain little or no mention of people.  Some of us may even recall that it is a short, economical form, containing no more than 17 syllables. Powerful  accessible imagery is a significant component,  giving the reader the opportunity to "fill in" and imagine unstated information. Within the world of serious haiku followers, an additional related poetic form, focusing more on human emotions, such as humor or irony is know as senryu. This defining information was provided by Keith Heiberg, who strongly praised her work in The Harvard Book Review, Volume IX, Number 2, Winter 2007. Peggy Willis Lyles, in the book's forward,  praised her "spare, accessible, insistently clear  and scrupulously honest" work.  Both Heiberg and Lyles  point out how vivid her images are, often approached from a somewhat unconventional point of view, even in the instance of everyday, seemingly small events. I cannot begin to comment from any insider's trained perspective. However,  as a reader, I find myself taken by the fresh sensory images they contain, smell as well as visual, tactile and auditory images.  They seem like small "gems" or "nuggets" that crystalize a perception, a truth, while representing a small quiet moment.  They call forth feelings of recognition, a sense that "I've been there" too. And the range of topics is impressive, from the more likely images of leaves, streams, birds, moon, to a slave cemetery, or a produce stand. As a birder who is fond of autumn, I immediately "saw" and "felt" the motion in the following:

indian summer

the intersecting circles

of hawks

Smell is such a powerful sensory "link" to memories for me. How many of you can recall this sensory moment?

a waft of cedar

from my sweater

winter rain

I noticed how these images evoked  feelings of sadness and futility in me when linking the prospect or reality of destruction in small and very large events:

war news

the underbelly of a moth

pressed to my window

How does she move us from a visual movment to the "space" of time? 

crochet hook

pulling the yarn through

deep November

The humor of this experience must be close to universal in our culture:

the um in her voice

before offering me

the senior discount

This lovely thoughtful collection warrants a place on your bookshelf or bedside table and a space in the quiet moments you set aside for reflection.

God's Frozen People

What an incredible imagination Michael Chabon has! Is it his affection for comic books, as we saw in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, that makes him capable of imagining an entire alternate universe? Here's his amazing “what if” in The Yiddish Policemen's Union - the state of Israel fails in 1948 and the US offers the Jews a temporary homeland for 60 years in Sitka Alaska. But now it's late 2007, and the US has never granted them permanent status. “Reversion” looms, when Federal District of Sitka will return to Alaska's control, and the fate of its current inhabitants is uncertain. All this serves as the backdrop for Chabon's main character Meyer Landsman. He's a hard-boiled, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, miserably divorced homicide detective right out of Raymond Chandler. Think of Robert Mitchum in a 40's film noir, with a Tlingit Indian sidekick named Berko who's a devout Jew. And they're trying to solve a murder that no one wants solved.

In some ways this book reminds me of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which also created an alternate reality where the outside world threatened the Jewish characters. But Chabon's book has a very different tone. It is simultaneously a black comedy, a whodunit and a treatise on Jewish diaspora. There's even a sort of love story - Meyer still pines for his ex-wife Bina, who is now his boss. The plot twists and turns, and I needed a crib sheet to keep all the characters straight. And I'm sure that if I knew Yiddish some of the slang in this imaginary universe would make more sense. A cell phone is a shoyfer; a cop is a noz; a gun is a sholem; cigarettes are papiros. Are these all inside jokes? But Chabon creates a vivid world that had me turning the pages to the very end.

A Different Kind of Love Affair

There must be a name for it. I don’t know what it is but I know that I am guilty: giving a book as a gift to a member of your household – a book that you yourself really want to read – with the knowledge that it will now be readily available to you. This time the “smoking gun” is The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart that I gave to my spouse, a lapsed piano player whom I hoped to coax back in to playing again. He hasn’t read the book yet but I have and enjoyed it on many levels.

The book’s subtitle says a lot about one level: “Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier.” The author is an American living in Paris and working as a journalist. As he walks his children to school each day he passes a small storefront shop with piano tools in the window. He is intrigued. But the first time that he drops in he is only left with more of a mystery. Eventually he wins the confidence of the owner Luc and is admitted into the life of the atelier. There is a lot of factual information about the history of the piano, how it came to have its current shape, details of the construction and repair of pianos, and profiles of some memorable piano teachers (good and bad) – along with generous doses of friendship, enthusiasm and French humor. It was really fascinating to learn that the physical construction of the early pianos influenced the actual music composed for those instruments. The early pianos would literally collapse under Listz’s hands.

But what also really moved me in the book was a description of an Italian pianist/engineer who decided in the late 1970s to re-engineer completely the piano, to challenge the Steinways, Bosendorfers, etc. He had to study acoustics, harmonics, woodworking, metal foundry and other specialties related to the piano. But he pursued his dream and his piano became a well-regarded (but expensive) reality. Look for a Fazioli at your next concert. What a great lesson: it is possible to take on the established leaders and to come out ahead, in effect, to “build a better mousetrap”. Just because something has been doesn’t mean that it must be! That’s what drives innovation and entrepreneurship.

I will think of pianos in a different way now - not to mention lifting the fall board at every opportunity. Right now there is a cello in my life - otherwise I would be sorely tempted to follow the author's lead. If you choose to read this book, you've been warned of its effects!