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Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel

11/27/2020

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I can’t recall the last time I read 700 pages of fiction or nonfiction, but I read Ninth Street Women with relish all the way through.  It tells the story of five American painters, all of whom were women and most of whom were associated with what is often called “The Second Generation” of The New York School of Abstract Expressionists.  The writing is exceptional; Gabriel is a master at the nonfictional approach to telling a great story.  Her prose flows like fiction, attending to the arc of the various subjects’ stories, laying out the ups and downs of their careers and their lives.
 
Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning were married to First Generation artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.  Somewhat overshadowed early on by their more famous husbands, Krasner spent much of her early years minding her more famous alcoholic mate and unable to find the time to develop her own work.  But she eventually got the chance to make some terrific abstract paintings. (click here and use the back button on your browser to return) https://whitney.org/collection/works/6153 Elaine de Kooning developed a career in art journalism along with her own work, which eventually moved past strict abstraction to painting portraits that employed abstract brushwork and combined the emotional feel of abstraction with recognizable imagery, producing wonders like John F. Kennedy’s presidential portrait.  https://npg.si.edu/blog/elaine-de-koonings-jfk
 
Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler were younger and never lived in the shadow of more famous mates, although Frankenthaler married Robert Motherwell, another First Generation artist, somewhat later in life.  Hartigan sometimes incorporated human figuration into her abstraction.  https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79636  Mitchell developed the use of colorful brushwork into a signature style that was perhaps the purest abstraction of any of these artists, and far and away my favorite. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79586  Frankenthaler is most often associated with thinning and pouring paint onto linen or canvas to create color fields she left alone or used as background for abstract designs.  I dare say this one early Frankenthaler bears some relation to two of the best First Generation painters, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/69050 
 
Along the way we get entertaining accounts of all the New York School’s hangouts, like the Cedar Bar and The Five Spot where the downtown artists drank and talked all night or listened to a young Thelonius Monk and others; and the Club, where the downtown and even uptown artists talked serious shop through the Fifties and Sixties.  We learn about the various galleries and gallery owners who showed their work, the writers who covered them, and the East Hampton and Provincetown getaways where they spent summers and beyond.  Their personal lives, and the number of lovers they took—both the women and the men—are covered in appropriate and entertaining detail.  Having thought the Sixties didn’t really start until the Summer of Love, and the Fifties were more Ozzie & Harriet, I was a bit surprised at some of this.
 
I came across Gabriel’s delightfully engaging account of all this as part of my research for a novel set in the same time and place, involving some of these and related historical figures.  For my money it’s the best nonfiction treatment, and certainly the most accessible for a general audience, of anything I’ve come across. 
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Self-Portrait with Russian Piano by Wolf Wondratschek

11/26/2020

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I teased this little volume last month based on a slim review by Ethan Hawke in the New York Times Book Review.  I was hoping to find another first-rate foreign writer, whose back catalogue is ready to appear in English two or three books a year once he or she has been translated.  Patrick Modiano a few years back came to mind.
 
I doubt that’s going to happen.  In part, it’s the eccentricities of the writing.  Here, Wondratschek eschews quotation marks to denote dialogue, while writing in first person from the point of view of the narrator sometimes and the separate protagonist other times.  That’s a wicked combination, which while it lends mystery and intrigue sometimes, yields frustration and consternation often.
 
The story is a good one.  Set in Vienna, it concerns an old Russian concert pianist, Suvorin, who tells an anonymous café acquaintance his story.  The mystery this setup (one might say conceit) yields feels intriguing at times, and just plain false and unnecessary at others.  The book shines when it has Suvorin telling his story in large stretches over drinks in his favorite café late into the night.  And it’s a good story, of how he was a leading Russian pianist who gave up his position out of an irrational but very real dislike—a violent dislike, bordering on rage—of . . . wait for it . . . applause at the end of a concert piece.
 
"The final note, it hasn’t even completely faded yet—and immediately you get screaming, noise, people shouting bravo.  Not a moment of quiet, not even half a second.  What ignorant people!  What barbarians!  No last reverberation, no lingering in that last echo, no trepidation, wonder, not a hint of abandon in those who had been listening.  . . .  What kind of people are they who, after a sonata by Schubert, the late one in B minor for example, completed two months before his death, break out into cheers?"
 
It’s a good point, but can you build a novel around it?  Actually, this author could.  But he didn’t, in my view, largely because that wasn’t enough of a challenge.  Rather than write clearly enough that we can all follow, he muddies the rest of the tale with ambiguities of every sort.  Eventually we do see that Suvorin happily served the rest of his days—after the authorities in Moscow relieved him of his career—playing at night in bars in places like Vienna.  But even that part of the story is denied us: It’s in the past when our unnamed narrator meets Suvorin living out his days alone, missing his deceased wife, but enjoying his talks with he-who-shall-go-unnamed.  And when our correspondent returns from six months away from Vienna, Suvorin is nowhere to be found.
 
I don’t think Wondratschek’s back catalogue is in danger of extensive further translation.  But the failure of this foray into works-in-translation convinced me to write about the singular phenomenon of Patrick Modiano.
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Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano

11/25/2020

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Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014.  He writes in French, and for the next several years a small cadre of translators went to work producing English versions of all his novels.  I believe the one who has translated the most is Mark Polizzotti.  His work on one of the early translations, a book of long stories called Suspended Sentences, was one of the first to market and I fell hard for this talented writer.  Unfortunately, I must have lent that one to somebody and couldn’t find it in the bookcase.  So I picked one off the stack I hadn’t yet read.
 
Like most of Modiano’s novels, Sleep of Memory is really a novella, this one particularly slim at something like 22,000 words by my estimate.  Like many of his books, it uses first-person narration, and here he blurs the line between the protagonist narrator and the writer himself; it thus reads in places like autobiography, or historical fiction in which the protagonist is the narrator.  Another familiar factor is the setting—Paris, in the years following the Second World War—where a young man is trying to make sense of what happened to him and his parents in the war, and where to go from here.  All this is Modiano’s home turf, and you can almost hear Édith Piaf on the soundtrack.
 
We first meet Mireille Ourousov, a woman staying in his mother’s abandoned apartment, where he lives a sort of latch-key teenager’s life in Paris in the early ‘60s with her friend, Jacques de Baviére.  Then comes Geneviève Dalàme, whom he meets in a café as he wanders in the still-dark mornings, and who lives in a hotel in the 13th and works at Polydor Studios.  He gives her a copy of
A la mémoire d'un ange by Gabrielle Veraldi, and she introduces him to a middle-aged woman, Madeleine Péraud, who lives in a high-ceilinged salon with tall windows in the Vale-de-Grâce.  Dalàme urges him to speak with Péraud about “the meetings.”
 
“One evening, she placed on the red sofa between Geneviève Dalame and me a volume called Meetings with Remarkable Men.  Today, fifty years later, that title and the word ‘meetings’ make me think of something that had never occurred to me: Unlike many people my age, I never tried to meet the four or five intellectual guides who dominated university life in those days, or become their disciple. Why?  In my capacity as an absentee student, it would have been natural for me to seek out a mentor, living as I did in a state of solitude and confusion.”
 
As he walks Geneviève home that night, she repeats more than once about Pèraud, “You really should talk to her about it,” sounding anxious even.  “She’ll get you up to speed . . .”
 
A few days later, he rides the bus with Geneviève to her work at Polydor Studios, then heads to the Val-de-Grâce to see Péraud.  “I read the book you lent me . . . I’d already heard of it.”  A friend he’d known in boarding school had parents who were in a group that met with its author, G.I. Gurdjieff, in the Haute-Savoie, and he’d met a few of his disciples.  She reacts to all this with a worried expression.  And she urges him to get Geneviève Dalàme to come live there, in the salon apartment, and he can come live there, too. “We must help Geneviève,” she says, in a tone “so serious that she ended up convincing me Geneviève Dalàme was in imminent danger.”  What that danger might be is unclear.
 
Until we turn the page, and a new chapter begins:
 
“Six years later, I was walking along Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, near the Mosque and the wall surrounding the botanical gardens.  A woman was walking ahead of me, holding a little boy by the hand.  Her nonchalant gait reminded me of someone.  I couldn’t help staring at her.

​I quickened my pace and caught up to the woman and little boy.  I turned toward her.  Geneviève Dalàme.  We hadn’t seen each other in those six years.  She smiled at me as if we’d just parted company the day before.”
 
Modiano is reported to have said that he has felt as if he were writing the same book over and over again.  This, I think, is because the books don’t rely much on plot, are mostly set in Paris and environs, and are about a man who’s lived a life very much like his own.  He has developed a distinctive and intriguing style he’s comfortable in, and so are his readers.  But many great writers explore over and over the place they grew up in, or lived their adult lives in, or both: Russo gives us Central Maine or Martha’s Vineyard, Richard Ford gives us Coastal Maine or New Jersey, Paul Auster gives us New York City, Colm Tóibín gives us Enniscorthy.  Because the plots and characters change, they don’t feel like the same book.  With Modiano, the plots are generally so light, the protagonists are largely himself, and the other characters are those who peopled his life during his teenage years during the war, and beyond.  And we feel them, and their world, like nobody’s business.
 
But there are exceptions.  Sundays in August, from 1986, is set in Nice on the French Riviera and reads more like a traditional crime novel than the others.  It opens with the protagonist spotting a character from his shady past hawking leather coats on the Promenade des Anglais, on his way to meeting up with a lover who’s wearing the huge stolen jewel they are trying to offload on some wealthy but unsuspecting tourist.  Little Jewel, from 1992, features a female protagonist and narrator, who spots her long-lost mother—or is it her mother, and is that the same yellow coat she’s wearing?—on the Paris metro.  She follows her, of course, into an overdue examination of everything that matters.  

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    Matthew Geyer

    Matthew Geyer is the author of two novels, Strays (2008) and Atlantic View (2020). ​.

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