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Agora (2009, released to the U.S. market June 2010)

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar, screenplay by Amenábar and Mateo Gil

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

At its most dramatic, political ambition and religious fanaticism have destroyed entire civilizations. Yet these dangerous bedfellows also threaten culture at subtle levels, no more so in the ancient world than in our own. Director Alejandro Amenábar’s latest film, Agora, works both ends of the spectrum. Set in a Roman-ruled Alexandria torn by religious hatred between pagans, Jews and early Christians, Agora centers on the life, work and death of fourth-century Neoplatonic philosopher, mathematician and teacher Hypatia (ca.360-415 AD). On the surface, Agora is a bloody exposé of the death of reason. Under the blood and gore, the senseless savagery and massacres, the director orchestrates a human drama fueled by fear, hunger and greed. Digging to the roots of violence, Amenábar reminds viewers that, indeed, we have not come so far.

Born in 1973 in Santiago, Chile, just prior to Pinochet’s coup, Amenábar was politicized at an early age. His mother lived through the Spanish Civil War, and after the coup his Chilean father moved the family to Madrid. With poor scholastic achievements behind him and a talent for film and music, Amenábar switched course.1 Now known for his fever-pitch psychological thrillers, he has been dubbed by reviewers as Alfred Hitchcock’s successor. Like Amenábar’s 2004 release The Sea Inside (Mar adentro), based on quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro’s 28-year crusade to legally terminate his life, in many ways Agora is atypical for his work. With The Sea Inside, the director risked a more elastic treatment than he used in his previous, highly controlled horror films.2 Viewers get to know Ramón (Javier Bardem) through two women who love him. In a 2004 interview published in Venice Magazine, Amenábar spoke of Ramón’s writings:

“He talked about loving, but not possessing someone. To be able to accept not owning a person. At the same time, he felt that he owned his own life, but he also didn’t mind getting rid it.”3

Similarly, Agora considers Hypatia through the people who love and admire her. Otherwise, she remains closed, yielding little evidence of an emotional life. That said, the beautiful Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) has plenty of passion for her studies, the contents of the last great bastion of learning in Roman Egypt, the Alexandria library, and the Chinese puzzle presented by Ptolemaic astronomy. While her students (young pagans, Christians and slaves) pine over her and noble pagans wrangle with Christian persecutors, Hypatia literally has her head in the clouds. She submits to no god or God, champions learning as the salvation of humanity, and believes that true justice is logical and egalitarian. The only axiom she never questions, “More things unite us than divide us,” reverberates through the film.

Ironically, Hypatia contemplates a universe far beyond human imaginings, symbolized by Amenábar’s cutaways to expansive clips of the cosmos; but her personal experience is narrow, limited to the sheltered environment provided by father Theon (Michael Londsdale). Theon encourages her to forsake marriage and motherhood for scholarship. Another irony: Hypatia’s beauty sits uncomfortably with her scrupulously honest (i.e., blunt) speech. For example, when student/suitor Orestes declares his love she responds with a handkerchief soaked in menstrual blood. Could she be less clear? Could he be less offended? Nevertheless, despite his lighthearted approach to lessons, Orestes remains devoted to Hypatia’s mind as well as her body.

As the film progresses Amenábar stacks irony, contradiction and opposition. Orestes’ counterpart, slave Davus (Max Minghella), thinks deeply about Hypatia’s theories and offers lines of inquiry that impress her. Where Orestes can state his feelings, Davus must hide them. Where Orestes not only survives her rebuff but renews the chase, Davus bristles when Hypatia refers to his slave status. Like other slaves, he is ripe for the Christian’s promises of power and bread for the meek and hungry. Perhaps more so, with wounded pride igniting his resentment. Viewers will not wonder at his vulnerability to recruitment by charismatic street preacher Ammonius (Ashraf Barhom) for the black-robed Christian militia, the Parabolini.

Amenábar sets Davus’s conflicted religious zeal against Orestes’ politically motivated conversion when Orestes becomes Roman prelate. Against these, the director places Synesius of Cyrene’s conventional, if peaceful, faith. Eventually, former Hypatia student Synesius becomes a powerful bishop. The devotion of all three of her formal pupils attests to Hypatia’s truly noble character but cannot save her. She is sacrificed to Christian extremism and martyred for the truth. She will not forsake reason, even when it fails. She has pledged her life to the agora, the open-air forum for trade–ideas as well as commodities. Like Sampedro in The Sea Inside, she feels she fully owns her life and its disposition.4

Weisz (The Lovely Bones; The Constant Gardener) plays Hypatia to perfection. Suspicious of emotion, Hypatia discounted its value to intellectual discourse and reasoned judgment. Hypatia can shed tears: for her father, bludgeoned in the agora; for the scrolls burned by the rabble; and for Orestes’ and Davus’s compromises. In the film’s most powerful scene, Orestes attends Hypatia while she ponders the lack of love in her life. Clearly capable of feeling loss, Hypatia then easily turns her thoughts to her astronomical quandary. Is her mistrust of emotion a subterfuge? Due to lifelong training? Or a well-reasoned choice. As Hypatia would no doubt counsel, viewers should judge for themselves.

1 Amenábar has scored most of his films. Dario Marianelli scored Agora.

2 Amenábar wrote the screenplay for The Sea Inside with Agora collaborator, Spanish director Mateo Gil.

3 The interview is available at: http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com/2010/01/alejandro-amenabar-and-sea-inside-open.html

4 For a lyrical fictional portrait of Hypatia, readers should acquire a copy of Ki Longfellow’s moving Flow Down Like Silver (Eio Books, 2009).

The Secret Life Of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn (Norton, 2010)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

In the mid-1990s, New York University libraries drew on the papers and printed books in its Jerome Charyn collection for an intriguing exhibit. With Master of Mythologies: The Fictional Worlds of Jerome Charyn, NYU spotlighted Charyn’s characteristic handling of his many and diverse subjects.1 Author of novels, memoirs, non-fiction, short stories, graphic novels, essays and reviews, Charyn revels in complexity. His portraits of people and places run deep; his interpretations of their histories, real and fictional, follow risky routes. Blending verifiable fact with emotional and psychological truths, accessed by him through great heart and imagination, Charyn creates worlds within worlds; like an archeologist, he sets forth to uncover entire civilizations teeming below the most benign exteriors.

One of the best examples is his recent rendering of Emily Dickinson, the beloved 19th-century New England poet. With The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, Charyn goes far beyond accepted scholarship, however mythologized. His Dickinson is dearer, closer and more real than any painted in the standard biographies. She emerges from her own box of phantoms, animated by hunger, rage and disappointment. Her greatest passion is for people; her poems, the strongest card in her suit. Charyn’s Dickinson yearns for attention from, in her eyes, a few worthy contenders. In his novel, she is a lonely lightning rod held captive in the desert.2

In a 2007 interview with in Book Forum’s Kera Bolonik (http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_05/2081 Feb./March 2008), Charyn discussed the evolution of his 2008 novel, Johnny One-Eye, set during the American Revolution. The novel’s protagonist is George Washington’s bastard son. Charyn explained that Johnny One-Eye is something of an alter-ego for him:

“As a child, I was wishing that I was an orphan, that my father wasn’t my father. As horribly cruel as it is to say that, cruelty is sometimes your strongest weapon. Imagining George Washington as your father, that you are the bastard child of this extraordinary man, empowered me in writing it. I could find all the juice–the hostility, the anger–that was necessary to keep the story alive.”

Charyn gives readers a satisfying serving of “juice” in The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. Here, she inhabits a number of identities challenging the image of a “mouse” who baked black cake for family and neighbors, scribbled poems with a pen kept dangling from her pocket, took refuge in her garden, and raised eyebrows with her odd behavior. Charyn ignites a profound metamorphosis in her as she changes from father’s “Dolly” living in the family’s Amherst home to the devil’s handmaiden boarding at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. As she matures, Dickinson adopts many guises, among them: the ghost of Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë pen name); Daisy the flower girl; a “kicking kangaroo”; a mourning Jumbo the circus elephant; the Queen Recluse; Antony to a line of cruel Cleopatras; and King Solomon. She roams Amherst’s streets and alleys after dark, searching for her lovers: an illiterate Mount Holyoke handyman she calls the Blond Assassin, and a rum-ruined rogue “Tutor from Mars” (actually, Yale) she calls her Domingo.

By day, she develops crushes on men and women we know from Dickinson biographies: father Edward, minister Charles Wadsworth, author Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor Samuel Bowles, volatile sister-in-law Susan, author/editor Mabel Loomis Todd, and Judge Otis Lord. Thirsting for them as she does for her tattooed handyman and Domingo, she resents their desertions: father to his political career; Wadsworth to his preaching; Higginson to his criticism of her poems; Bowles to his family; Susan to her jealousy; and Lord to his rapacious niece.

Edward’s and Susan’s betrayals recur in different forms, best symbolized by his obsession with smoke and fires and her nursing of scarlatina (scarlet fever) patients. Dickinson cannot draw them with her “feathers” and “plumage.” They find heat elsewhere, and she cannot survive his indifference and her “siroccos.” Another masterful image, handyman Tom’s tattoo, reflects Dickinson’s emotional state. At first, she conventionally identifies the tattoo as a sign of love. Then, Tom tells her the design brands an orphan whose heart is blue and broken by pain.

Like Tom, two other fictional characters haunt Dickinson, a charity student at Holyoke named Zilpah Marsh, and the yellow-gloved Holyoke vice principal, Miss Rebecca Winslow. As one of society’s outcasts, Zilpah is free to be as dangerous as she desires, while as the daughter of an Amherst squire, Dickinson must live out her fantasies in visions and dreams. As Dickinson’s alter ego, Zilpah reveals a conflict quite evident in Dickinson’s letters; the poet believed in her scribblings but doubted the sanctity of her soul. Was she really Squire Dickinson’s good little daughter or a devil in disguise? Repeatedly vanquished by death–Edward, her mother, her young nephew Gib–Dickinson seized the promise of immortality. But the only relief she seems to find in Amherst comes from two loyal companions who never withdraw their support: sister Lavinia (who protects her poems) and her Newfoundland Carlo (who protects her person).

In Johnny One-Eye, a vivid Revolutionary-Era America grounds the riveting adventure. In The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, the stolid Christian world of mid 19th-century Amherst is a chimera. Literally blinded by light, Dickinson suffered from an eye disorder acute during her most prolific period, a time when her box of phantoms erupted into words with wings. Charyn’s excavation of Dickinson’s phantoms is as startling as Dickinson’s poems, which invite readers to consider worlds contained on the head of a pin. Alive to the magic of her poetry, Charyn weaves a Dickinson mythology equal to his subject.

1 Author of more than 40 books, including a cult-status detective series featuring New York City policeman Isaac Sidel and three memoirs of his own Bronx childhood (The Dark Lady from Belorusse, The Black Swan and Bronx Boy), Charyn gave his personal papers to New York University libraries. Master of Mythologies: The Fictional Worlds of Jerome Charyn was held from October 31, 1995-February 1, 1996.

2 In addition to William Luce’s outstanding 1976 play The Belle of Amherst (available on DVD), other fascinating takes on the poet’s life and work include Dickinson scholar Judith Farr’s 1996 novel I Never Came to You in White; Joyce Carol Oates’s 2008 Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James and Hemingway; two delightful children’s books (The Mouse of Amherst by Elizabeth Spires, illustrated by Claire A. Nivola, and Emily by Michaed Bedard, illustrated by Barbara Cooney); and biographer Lyndall Gordon’s 2010 Lives like Loaded Guns: Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds.

For spring 2010, the New York Botanical Garden has staged a lovely evocation of Dickinson as gardener. For more information, go to: www.nybg.org

The Gaudí Key by Esteban Martín and Andreu Carranza (Morrow, 2008; Harper pbk, 2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

When Catalan modernist architect Antonio Gaudí died in 1926, not only did he leave his Sagrada Família, a cathedral of vast scope, design and symbolism, unfinished; a labyrinthine trail of imagery, allusions and historical references remains for admirers of his peculiar rendering of neo-gothic style to decipher. Gaudí reviled Renaissance ideals of symmetry and regularity. Gothic religious architecture was conceived to be a mirror of the cosmos, as well as a book of stone meant to be read by the faithful. Messages conveyed in stone directed worshippers to truths too precious to be laid bare before the blind, ignorant or blatantly evil. Elaborate weavings of ancient myth and legend, classical philosophy, medieval theology, zoology, nature and occult mysticism might appear within Christian narratives set in stone. Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece contains all of these and more. Scholars and aesthetic detectives will continue to conjecture, theorize, project and, of course, argue amongst themselves while, ultimately, Gaudí’s work resists definitive interpretation.

Gaudí’s fierce defense of his Catalan heritage and traditional Catalan styles anchors his work. From Moorish and oriental motifs, European art nouveau and ideas promoted by architects at home and abroad (e.g., 19th-century French architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc), Gaudí absorbed a prodigious number of influences. He filtered these through his personal, essentially medieval Christian worldview to construct buildings mirroring God’s creation; his aim, to become God’s architect on earth. Certainly, a lofty goal but this giant of an artist was a simple man. Dressing like a pauper, living in his studio, toiling with few breaks and even fewer conveniences, Gaudí dedicated his life to his work and, in his later years, his work to his God.

For readers eager for an exhilarating (and exhausting) ride through Gaudí’s Barcelona, a good place to start is Esteban Martín and Andreu Carranza hair-raising thriller, The Gaudí Key. The authors have made fiction a cauldron in which they stir a heady mixture of fact, fantasy, history and mystery. Although most reviewers have compared The Gaudí Key to Dan Brown’s 2003 blockbuster, The Da Vinci Code, it seems more accurate to place it with Catalan author Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s work. Like Angel’s Game, Zafón’s follow-up to his outstanding Shadow of the Wind, The Gaudí Key is a bit too ambitious. At times, multiple plots spin off, diverting the pace. Still, fascinating considerations of, for example, the Catalan Renaixença, Zeno’s Paradoxes, the Garden of Hesperides, suiseka (the Japanese art of stones), fractal mathematics, ancient Christian societies and an elusive alchemist known as Fulcanelli provide the novel’s high points. The places at which Gaudí’s life merges with these discourses might cause eyebrows to raise and heart rates to rise; in the instance of Fulcanelli, the alchemist disappeared in 1926, the year Gaudí died, and during her childhood María, the main character, read one of Fulcanelli’s critical works, Le Mystère des Cathédrales (The Mystery of the Cathedrals), published in Paris in–you guessed it–1926.

Adept at layering recurring symbols, Martín and Carranza orchestrate echoes that will leave many readers incredulous at Gaudí’s genius. Numerical symbols include the number seven (knights, Greek letters, riddles, buildings). Other types of imagery pop up time and again: animals (tortoises, pelicans); flowers and plants (sunflowers and mushrooms); shapes (circles, squares, stars, crosses, pentagrams), fairy tales (breadcrumb trails, enchanted houses) and maps (Barcelona, Ursa Major, one on María’s skin). As with Gaudí’s cathedral, this trove of sign and symbol masks a simple idea. Martín and Carranza suggest that, as guardian of Christ’s cornerstone, Gaudí was murdered rather than victim of a streetcar accident. Committed by the Corbel, the name of an evil society (as well as an architectural term), represented on the facade of Sagrada Família by a demon holding a bomb, the murder has been repeated 80 years later with the death of Gaudí’s now elderly apprentice. Next in line is the apprentice’s granddaughter, María. She and her lover, Miguel, have six days (echoing the six directions and six days in which God created the world) to find the place where Gaudí hid the 300-year-old relic. Between gruesome murders, María and Miguel accept their destiny as saviors of Christendom and life partners.

The English-language translation of the original, written in Catalan, lacks Gaudí’s flourish, but competently propels the many narrative threads. More felicitous, descriptions of seven Gaudí projects holding clues for María–Casa Vicens, Parc Güell, Sagrada Família, La Pedrera, Casa Batlló, Casa Calvet and Palacio Güell–have force and clarity. If not entirely successful as a thriller, The Gaudí Key succeeds as a bow to a gifted son of cauldron-makers whose vessels of stone contain mystical worlds yet to be revealed. By suspending disbelief, readers will be enthralled as they are caught in Martín and Carranza’s intricate gothic web.

The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner (Twelve paperback edition, 2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

“One always begins to forget a place as soon as it’s left behind,” according to Charles Dickens. The eminent Victorian filled his novels with characters who know their share of misery, much of it tied to the places in which they live. From the penny-pinching scrooge to Oliver’s fellows in the orphanage, Dickens pretty well covered the field of misery in Victorian London. It isn’t difficult to imagine that they would gladly leave it and memories of it behind. But some of Dickens’s most memorable characters rise above their conditions to embrace a happiness seldom traceable to a change in circumstances or amnesia; rather, it comes either from an intrinsically contented nature or a change of heart.

In The Geography of Bliss, National Public Radio commentator Eric Weiner discovers that, perhaps, Dickens might not have been as spot-on about memory as he was about humanity. Clearly, the places where Weiner traveled and lived as NPR foreign correspondent left a lasting impression and vast field of inquiry to explore: the potential for happiness in residents of markedly different countries.

Entwined as it is with political, economic, social, religious and philosophical systems and personal beliefs, happiness is a slippery concept. Weiner traveled to 10 countries to pin it down. Naturally, the first stop any self-respecting journalist would make is the Netherlands, home of the World Database of Happiness. Run by what Weiner the humorist describes as a “Dutch Robin Williams,” the WDH churns out statistics drawn from happiness studies. Here, Weiner learns important lessons. Joy does not result from seemingly unlimited freedom and the security promised by a socialist agenda. More disappointing to Weiner, happiness can be reduced to a number in a database. Fortunately, this somewhat discouraging beginning merely whets Weiner’s investigative instincts. In fact, it sets him and readers on a wild quest in search of bliss.

Early on, Weiner dispenses with simple solutions; gobs of money and air conditioning in Qatar do not produce happy citizens; an end to Soviet rule did not release Moldova from the doldrums; crippling cold and darkness cannot squelch Icelanders’ ability to find happiness in failure; and unparalleled levels of comfort and convenience do not appear to have aided Americans in their constitutionally granted pursuit of happiness. But there are some simple ingredients in the happiness recipe, commonly promoted by what he calls the “self-help industrial complex”: family, community, spirituality and trust. One less obvious influence, culture, turns out to be critical. For example, Weiner’s chapters on Qatar and Moldova suggest that lack or obliteration of a homogenous culture (or, in the cases of Qatar and America, a superficial culture) chips away at personal happiness. Regarding Iceland, Weiner says:

“Iceland–and this is the part that is truly mind-blowing–is inventing its culture now. As you read these words, some Icelandic musician is composing the quintessential Icelandic song. So far, no such thing exists. There is no tradition of instrumental music in Iceland. It was too cold and dark back then to bother, or maybe the ancient Icelanders were too drunk at the time. So young Islanders are deciding for themselves what is quintessentially Icelandic. It is a wonderful thing to watch. To be present at the moment of creation.”

By the time they reach these words, many readers will have begun to wonder where creativity figures in the happiness equation. Although Weiner does not expand upon creativity as typically conceived, in his chapter on Iceland, literally, he hits the tip of an iceberg. Icelanders’ love of their language is a major component of the glue that holds them together. It makes them a bunch of frequently intoxicated but nevertheless happy poets. Similarly, language in Thailand plays a role in that country’s buoyancy. The phrase mai pen rai (”it is nothing” or “never mind”) evokes a truth often spoken by Weiner’s happiest subjects; thinking registers as a serious threat to personal and collective joy. And like the Inuit, who use many terms for the word snow to convey subtle distinctions, the Thai language includes multiple phrases for the act of smiling. Self-professed Eeyore-ish Weiner’s favorite is yim mai awk (”I’m-trying-to-smile-but-can’t smile”). In Thailand, the language of smile is a complex window into the Thai character. Leaving Thailand at the start of a short-lived military coup, Weiner is convinced that the “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy will prevail.

It won’t take American readers long to understand that Weiner’s journey mirrors their own as citizens with a birthright of happiness. In order to achieve it, one must do as Weiner has done; define what it means to pursue happiness, as well as the state in which one qualifies as a happy person. Is it muddling through with a stiff upper lip, as do the Brits, never appearing weak or in need? Or is it giving up all desires, greed, envy and lust like buddhists in Bhutan, where the king has declared a policy of Gross National Happiness to counter the industrialized world’s fixation with Gross National Product? Weiner admits to sharing a commonly held view of the Himalayas as Shangri-La, derived from his reading of James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, well-known to high school and college students and fans of Frank Capra’s 1937 film adaptation. (A 1957 movie musical with Charles Boyer, John Gielgud and Liv Ullmann and 1956 musical comedy are other dramatizations.) A consideration of Hilton’s novel follows this review.

Weiner’s interviews with expatriates to Bhutan, a tiny country located high in the Himalayas between Tibet to the north and India to the south, confirm impressions from college days. One can be happy in an isolated oasis like Bhutan. Likewise, expatriates to the other visited countries weigh in on happiness quotients, the natives’ and their own. Contradictions abound, but in the remaining two destinations/chapters Weiner deftly pulls together his observations: India, a land founded on and completely comfortable with contradiction, and his homeland, America, where angst-ridden white male European philosophers and Freud have led generations to think as obsessively as they work.

The Geography of Bliss is just too good to miss. Weiner’s ironic, self-deprecating humor spices up ponder-ready wisdom and practical advice. As a road map of happiness, Weiner’s book is a trove of insights and tools to help readers unearth little gifts of joy wherever they live.

Happiness is Letting Go: Lost Horizon by James Hilton

Outwardly simple in plot and format, James Hilton’s now-classic view of a mountain-top Eden called Shangri-La ranks in many college students’ minds with Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Perhaps it is ironic that young adults who first read these books in high school and college are deeply affected by Hilton’s and Hesse’s novels, as they describe world-weary characters for whom spent youthful passions have left a void where wisdom might grow. This resonance suggests a human need, present even in those who have yet to revel in the world’s earthy delights, for stillness and refined beauty. In an age when recognition on the global stage requires being large, loud and ubiquitous, the definition of Art has become cloudier and more subjective than ever. For Hilton’s main character, 37-year-old English diplomat Robert “Glory” Conway, peace and stillness are pre-requisite for creation and preservation of genuine beauty. Between the two world wars, he and three companions are hijacked, or more accurately “spirited away,” from China to the mountains between northern India and Tibet. There, Conway discovers that the treacherous mountain landscape, lush valley and idyllic lamasery sheltering them discourage his typically half-hearted participation in modern life.

Dubbed a war hero, the well-educated Conway had taught at Oxford University and, in hindsight, believes that the quiet, scholarly life better suited his nature. Yet that, too, left him uneasy. Coming as it does between his return to England to become foreign secretary and his last assignment in China, evacuating nearly 100 Western residents of the Chinese city of Baskul during a revolution, the hijacking provides, Conway deems, a necessary interruption in his meaningless life. Within the walls of the lamasery, surrounded by beautiful objects and treated with highly cultivated, dispassionate courtesy, Conway finds a balm that begins to heal his wartime devastation.

Hilton bookends his fantastic tale with prologue and epilogue in the voice of the novel’s narrator, Woodford Green, who has met with a group of classmates from his Oxford days. Between these, Hilton places the bulk of his story as a manuscript written by one of Green’s Oxford chums, a novelist named Rutherford who found Conway recovering in a mission hospital at Chung-Kiang. The manuscript accounts for Conway’s disappearance after the evacuation, through his time at the lamasery, later discovery in Chung-Kiang and subsequent vanishing from a ship traveling from Japan to San Francisco.

The effect of the lamasery on Conway’s traveling companions amplifies the inclinations it reveals in him: A junior civil servant named Mallinson rages against his forced captivity in Eden; a jovial American businessman plans to enjoy the lamasery’s gracious hospitality for as long as possible; and a female missionary snatches at a chance to convert the inhabitants. Eventually, as the pulls of the modern world become a distant memory, the American and missionary envision remaining indefinitely, while Conway decides that this place, which cannot be located on a map and from which few have traveled to the outside, offers the only peace he will ever know. Hilton demonstrates just how easy it is for Conway to let go of his old life. As the days unwind more slowly, the urge to ”do” grows fainter.

The shocking revelations of the lamasery’s history and age of its residents vouchsafed to him alone by the High Lama merely confirm Conway’s own impressions; rather than fear Shangri-La’s isolation like Mallinson, or seek to breech it like the missionary, or take advantage of it like the American, Conway embraces it. Rutherford’s manuscript explains that:

“It was not so much any individual thing that attracted him as the gradual revelation of elegance, of modest and impeccable taste, of harmony so fragrant that it seemed to gratify the eye without arresting it. Only indeed by a conscious effort did he recall himself from the artist’s mood to the connoisseur’s, and then he recognized treasures that museums and millionaires alike would have bargained for, exquisite pearl blue Sung ceramics, paintings in tinted inks preserved for more than a thousand years, lacquers in which the cold and lovely detail of fairyland was not so much depicted as orchestrated.”

By this point, Conway understand that bargaining between museums and millionaires defiles art works; crude behaviors fueled by emotions and base desires threaten noble human dignity as exemplified by his elderly guide at the lamasery and a young, musically gifted woman, both aspirants to lamahood. Since it appeared, admiration for Hilton’s novel has led many people to ponder the location of his lost paradise; some have tried to reach it; and a few have made it a lifelong quest. Weiner may have come close when he landed in Bhutan. But it doesn’t matter whether or where Shangri-La exists, what happened to Conway after he disappeared for the second time, or if the high lama’s testimony to miraculous happenings in the Himalayas contains truth. Hilton grants us a vision of Art, Wisdom, Peace and Stillness set against the music of the spheres. This vision remains as water for the seeds of beauty inside us that grow just a little bit more each time we glimpse Eden.

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Manifesto in 41 Tales by Marilyn Chin (Norton, 2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

If the title of this review seems a bit cumbersome, it reflects the number of labels that Marilyn Chin and her work have acquired during the poet’s career.1 A genuine revolutionary, Chin examines through her writings relationships between the powerful dominant culture and the have-nots. Born in Hong Kong in the 1950s, Chin was raised in Portland, Oregon. As an assimilated Asian American, Chin never strays far from the immigrant’s vision of the American Dream and its glaring pitfalls: In America there might be room for all, but space is a hot commodity accorded only to those who buy into a hierarchy fixed by (mostly) white, wealthy, male hands. Of course, those outside the spectrum can gain access to the upper echelons with a formidable title and money, money, money.

Like Chin herself, the Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, her debut “novel,” defies description but has pulled a wide range of labels from reviewers. Readers are advised to skip consideration of format, except to marvel at Chin’s reversals and revisions of classic Chinese literature, history, ancient eastern philosophies, Zen and Buddhist scripture, folklore and legend, ghost stories and fables. Chin’s devotion to contemporary adaptations of historical sources (manga, comics, kung fu-style superheroes) is obvious. One might even add yet another label to her resume: ninja poet. Chin’s means of war against the machine are, indeed, unorthodox. Few could read Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen and not experience an epiphany, however modest; a shift in the spaces of the heart.

Separated into seven sections, Chin’s 41 tales, variously set in (fictional) Piss River, Oregon, Southern California and Hong Kong, center on Double Happiness twins Moon and Mei Ling Wong. Daughter No. 1 Moon’s stoic indifference connects her to countless poor Chinese who have journeyed to America to slave day and night in restaurants, laundries and markets. No. 2, Mei Ling, sits at the opposite end of the scale, determined to squeeze as much out of the system as possible. Mei Ling delights in the spoils she wins by using the dominant culture’s weapons. Guarding these two fiercely intelligent but lost members of the assimilated generation is legendary matriarch Grandmother Wong, reputed to be able to fly and wielding a cleaver with abandon. Moon owes her kung fu skills to Grandmother Wong. Although the girls do not share their grandmother’s unspecified, superstition-based moral code, it is nearly impossible not to respect it. For hyphenated Americans and those born here after the bomb sure bets are off, but Grandmother Wong acts with bullet-proof decision.

Bullies and beasts of burden (animal and human) figure prominently in Chin’s tales. The shocking scenario of Chin’s opening story (”Moon” in the volume’s first section, Mooncakes and Matriarchs) shows a “little fat Chinese girl” brutalized on a West Coast beach by blond teenage twins. It is a chilling lesson in the politics of modern life. Moon and Mei Ling witness another kind of brutality on their parents, owners of the Double Happiness Chinese restaurant. While the girls earn top grades and slots in the educational conveyor belt that will catapult them into their futures (Moon as a professor of immunology, Mei Ling as a professor of literature and a poet), they help their parents by delivering Chinese food to customers living in the ethnically technicolor Southern California landscape. Bitter beyond repair from unrelenting economic and cultural pressures, their father dies of a massive heart attack. Surrendering to despair, their mother returns to Hong Kong.

Chin’s Chinese name, Mei Ling, signals autobiography in her portrait of daughter No.2, a girls-just-wanna-have-fun type. As Chin explains in her endnotes, the fox girl archetype echoes through centuries of Asian literature. Here, Mei Ling plays fox girl, luring unsuspecting men of all races and income levels to their doom. Mei Ling’s sexual appetite astounds, perhaps more so considering the risks she takes in drawing Grandmother Wong’s fire. Chin introduces Mei Ling in “Round Eyes,” the second story in Mooncakes and Matriarchs. The shock here comes from a violation sanctioned by assimilated Chinese parents, who send their children to Japan to achieve “Madonna Eyes.”

Chin the poet brings to each set piece her gift for emotionally laden imagery. The short chapters beg for multiple readings. Her prose is provocative, requiring readers to face a choice, take a stand and question typical viewpoints. For example, Chin asks:

“Don’t you know that every immigrant’s tale is a comic romance? Once upon a time, a couple of absolute nobody girls named Wong are born. They load up a crappy donkey-van with bad Chinese food and drive in circles for 10 hours. They smooch a few silly boys on the way….Then it never fails—by the end of the tale, those certain Wong-named-nobodies finally blossom into somebodies.

Or, do they?”

Readers well-versed in Buddhist koans and parables and Asian animal fables will find familiar ground in Chin’s stories. Hidden in each, like the golden yoke center of a mooncake, a deeper meaning waits for discovery. For those who do not know the originals, Chin provides insight in her endnotes.

In the concluding section of her book, Chin offers three endings that mirror the ambiguity of the twins’ fate. But considering Grandmother Wong’s deep compassion to the fatherless and the widow, unwavering self-confidence, willingness to choose the hard road, make the tough decision and cut off the wound to save the soul (including hacking a Barbie doll down the middle), there seems no doubt which ending she would choose. Clearly, Grandmother Wong’s ancient wisdom has weight even in post-colonial America.

1 Wong’s poetry collections include Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002), The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (1994) and Dwarf Bamboo (1987).

Sitting for Klimt: Five Novellas by Carol Bergman (IUniverse, 2006)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

For a writer focused on the arts, Carol Bergman’s life had an auspicious start. While pregnant, Bergman’s mother took a course on Picasso at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Other sources from her personal past are evident in Bergman’s work: Her mother grew up in a Vienna shaped in good measure by Secessionist artists and their ideals; as a child, her father, a collector of Viennese painter Egon Schiele’s watercolors and drawings, took her to galleries and museums.

The stories collected in Bergman’s Sitting for Klimt reveal the author’s supreme sensitivity to the subtle ways in which contact with art and artists transforms lives. Other themes preoccupying the author echo in these five novellas: women as artists and lovers; women straddling the precipitous chasm between tradition-bound societies and the modern world; women searching for love during war; and women resisting alienation and resignation. Outcasts by nature of gender, the women in Bergman’s stories encounter and, frequently, conquer social, sexual, racial and religious boundaries but not without consequences. They bear deep inner wounds, sources of great wisdom and great pain.

In Sitting for Klimt, a young married Jewish woman from a privileged background discovers her power over men. If not deftly wielded and guided by an awareness of their greed, lust, vanity and treachery in love–such power, Anna Glass learns, will be turned against her. A victim of her husband’s indifference and mercenary instincts, Anna believes that Gustav Klimt is different. Anna has heard that Klimt, painter of provocative, searingly beautiful portraits, seduces his models and wealthy women, mostly from the new merchant class, who come to him for portraits to be paid for by fathers or husbands. She assumes too much about Klimt, and as Anna’s sad story unfolds Bergman destroys Anna’s ideas, along with most of Anna’s hopes and dreams. When Anna arrives at Klimt’s studio to begin work, she brings her maid, two of her children and an architect hired by her husband to build the family’s new home. She tells Klimt, “Frankly, I did not want to be alone with you in the studio just yet.” He tells her, “It is only a portrait, not a seduction.” Humorous within the context of Anna’s expectations, Klimt’s deadpan reply shows his uncompromising commitment to his art.

Sparked by her relationship with Klimt, Anna matures into a modern women, symbolized by an outfit she purchases designed by Klimt and sold by the Flöge sisters.1 Bergman accomplishes an intriguing twist on painter/model interaction. Whereas the best portraits are intimate windows into the sitter’s psyche, Anna minutely observes Klimt as if he is her subject. She craves danger. Again, Bergman’s artful shorthand symbolizes her character’s inner yearnings: We learn that Anna convinced her husband to permit a ride on an amusement park novelty, upon which no society women had been seen. Similarly, in order to secure her reform dress Anna, a wealthy Jew, ventures into a Jewish ghetto, where hunger and poverty accuse her innocence. Eyes now open to a hostile world, Anna is better prepared when World War I erupts. Betrayed by husband and country (symbolized by the emperor), Anna finds true friends in bohemians Klimt and Flöge.

In the following stories, Bergman imagines Marc Chagall’s love affair with his wife, Bella, and their life together as World War II approaches told from the perspective of Bella’s friend (Lovers in Blue & Green); the struggle of Frida Kahlo, photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo and painter/muralist Maria Izquierdo for recognition as peers of Mexican masters of their age (Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siquieros) in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution told from Izquierdo’s point of view (Three Women); a Sumerian woman’s account of her apprenticeship with an imperial sculptor at the court of Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten and the end of the pharaoh’s reign (When I See Her); and a naïve seduction attempt of American painter John Singer Sargent by a precocious young Jewish woman told in her voice and set in London beginning in 1898, when the main character meets Sargent, and concluding just after the passing of the 1905 Aliens Act (In Full Sail).

Bergman alludes to well-known paintings by Klimt (Adele Bloch-Bauer in her gilded armature), Chagall (La Mariée, Green Violinist), Kahlo (self-portraits) and Sargent (Madame X). Her characters walk a tightrope between abandon to art and acquiescence to custom. For example, when Anna first dons her reform costume, her maid questions the lack of a corset. As she models her new clothing for the maid, including special open shoes revealing the arch of Anna’s foot, a liberated Anna defiantly “tossed her lace-up boots to one side and plunged the wooden handled button hook into the soft wood of her writing table.”

Bergman’s descriptions of Chagall’s early years in Vitebsk, Russia, invite abandon, as well: “Bursting with the energy of desire, Marc stood naked in a small shack behind his parents’ home and, because of his poverty, painted his longings and reveries onto bedsheets, tablecloths and rags.” While Jews were being prohibited from participation in Russian society, certain cafes and underground venues allowed people of all races and gender to sing, dance, paint and write. As Bella’s friend records in her journal, “At any moment, a poet might rise to declaim a new work, or a singer to render a jazz tune from the other side of the world.”

Perhaps most moving is Bergman’s rendering of Izquierdo’s liberation at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City: “At the Escuela, I was a free woman. My brushstrokes belonged only to me. My body, so long corseted inside tradition, was now loosened with desire.”

Still, questions linger behind the characters’ epiphanies. Despite their triumphs, these women continue to doubt their society, a modern world’s promise and themselves. Considering her friendship with Sargent and his rejection of a show at her gallery, Ena Oppenheim suggests, “Perhaps it is because I am Jewish. Perhaps it is because I am a woman.” His reassurances do little to resolve her muddled emotions. She settles for acceptance, assuaged with evidence of her maturity. Readers will sense that like Anna Glass and Bergman’s other subjects, Ena would not relinquish her contact with a great artist nor her own creative life for peace, security or any other trapping of conventional life. After all, dancing on the roof with Chagall’s uncle or riding the dynamo at the Prater Amusement Park trump a formal society tea any day of the week.

1 With his friend and supposed lover Emilie Flöge and her sister, Klimt created “reform” ensembles that freed the female body from boned corsets and other binding elements. For a review of Elizabeth Hickey’s historical novel exploring the relationship between Klimt and Flöge, The Painted Kiss, see www.studio-online.com, Bookshelf.

A Stopover in Venice by Kathryn Walker (Knopf, 2008; Anchor paperback, 2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

In outline, Kathryn Walker’s A Stopover in Venice might seem a typical period-piece fiction, spiced with intrigue and romance, potentially enjoyable but not promising a rarified reading experience. The difference between this debut and other contemporary/historical melanges currently making bookclub rounds is actress-cum-novelist Walker’s passionate regard for her 16th-century characters and the 21st-century women who uncover their stories. Binding these women distanced by four centuries are painful disappointments in love, noble suffering, jewels of wisdom hidden in loss, and redeeming clarity born from disillusion.

The novel begins in the present day with Cornelia Everett exiting a train in Venice, seemingly an act of courage but really a desperate decision. As the train proceeds, spiriting away her world-famous second husband and his entourage of fellow musicians and devotees, Cornelia realizes that she that she no longer knows who she is, was or might be.1 Before the death of her talented first husband, a writer, Cornelia, or Nel as she’s called, dreamed of an acting career. Now, she merely trails a bright star as he moves further away from her. But she senses that her sojourn in Venice, whose walkways maddeningly twist and turn in labyrinthine confusion, will be transforming. She finds her center in Venice physically in the Piazza San Marco; emotionally, in a group of artists and historians who join her in solving a mystery surrounding 16th-century painter Giorgione (1477-1510) and the woman who loved him.

At first, some readers may find it difficult to like Nel; the first quarter of the novel moves slowly as Nel reveals her self-doubts and her husband Antony’s shallow lifestyle. Although readers learn that she had been a “warrior,” aside from stepping off the train into unknown territory (with her husband’s credit card in hand, ensuring her a place at the Gritti Palace, books, meals and a few irresistible keepsakes), nothing in her actions or thoughts demonstrates strength. Then another Nel emerges when she comes upon a group of boys torturing a dog. Her simple act of kindness leads Nel to a palazzo, formerly a convent and hospital, owned by aging landscape painter Lucy. A fresco in Lucy’s home, covered by plaster for centuries, is being restored by a handsome Italian named Matteo. Sparks fly between Nel and Matteo, and another small painting is discovered in the bedroom where Nel sleeps, along with a priceless 400-year-old cache secreted in a trunk: a painted box, clothing, letters and a diary. Could Giorgione have painted the fresco and box? Who wrote the letters and journal? Who were the independent and intelligent patrician nuns who lived at Le Vergini? Through fault of birth order, they could not marry but had the consolation of freedom to study, paint and even take lovers.

Curious about Le Vergini, Nel and Matteo explore Lucy’s attic, where they find an extraordinary collection of 16th-century objects in the trunk. After examining the box, Matteo determines that its cover painting might be Giorgione’s work. Nel senses links between Giorgione’s famous La Tempesta (1506-1508) and Laura (c.1506), and the paintings at the palazzo. Two other scholars, American Lydia and Scottish Ronald, join what becomes for Nel a magic circle of friends pursuing a meaningful alternative to her marriage. Meanwhile, they contact a discreet female translator to work on the journal. From this point, present-day action alternates with extracts from the letters and journal. Quite powerful, these pages introduce 16th-century teenager Clara, a skilled painter, Giorgione’s apprentice and his lover; her friend, cloistered Taddea; the insightful nun Donna Tomassa; and Giorgione and his studio. Unlike Lucy, Matteo and the other scholars, Nel has little context but dives wholeheartedly into her subject, learning about enlightened convents like Le Vergini, papal reforms revoking the nuns’ freedoms, and rigid social expectations preventing Clara and Giorgione from openly courting.

The novel’s high points are incandescent. Walker weaves subtle parallels between characters; for example Nel, Lucy, Matteo, Lydia, Ronald and, it seems, even the translator have been lonely in love. As parallel fantasies, their past relationships seem less real than Giorgione’s 16th-century Venice, a wonderland where either by profession (the scholars) or miracle (Lucy and Nel) they inhabit. Nel’s yearnings merge with Clara’s desires, and the secret life led at Le Vergini to ensure the nuns’ independence.

Walker’s impressive grasp of literature, history and religion ranges far: Henry James’s The Aspern Papers; Stefan Zweig’s Casanova; Renaissance humanist Petrarch; and Hindu gods and goddesses Shiva, Paravati, Ganesha and Durga. Through such references and symbols, the author renders Venice as a catalyst for epiphany. Set against the city’s physical beauty, Nel’s interiority places readers in the midst of major personal transformation. Similarly, Walker’s understanding of Giorgione’s genius contains seeds of change. Little is known about the enigmatic master who died of plague at age 33, yet his commitment to Neo-Platonic harmony, created from “discordant concord,” and to music and poetry as the wellsprings of art deeply affected great artists for generations.

Just as she gains a permanent place in Nel’s heart, Clara will likely prove unforgettable for readers. Her journal entries cover a mere four years, from ages 16 through 20, but during that time Clara endured much danger and felt much passion, becoming wise far beyond her years. As a prize for achieving her admirable maturity, Clara has hope. Poignantly, she articulates in one journal entry:

“Hope, I now believe, is not a thing heedlessly given to be crushed by the vicissitudes of experience; rather it is the unanticipated reward of struggle endured, a gift of grace. I have found this to be so. I believe as well that innocence itself is won through patience and endurance, nor is it the infantile luxury so often remarked. One must gaze long and with fortitude to begin to see clear. I cannot with my own experience imagine that the world is kind in all things, but I am certain in my soul that rich and mysterious gifts are concealed in the dark folds of pain.”

Likewise, mysterious gifts are hidden in A Stopover in Venice, an offering from Walker to those who have loved, lost and found redemption in art.

1 Some reviewers have identified correspondences between Walker’s description of Nel’s relationship with Antony and Walker’s own brief marriage to singer/songwriter James Taylor.

The White Garden by Stephanie Barron (Bantam, 2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

A true historian is a detective. His or her joy derives from identifying loose threads while scouring recorded fact and accepted opinions. Best known for her charming mysteries featuring Jane Austen in the role of sleuth, author Stephanie Barron is, indeed, a historian with whom to be reckoned. Honing her skills while earning an undergraduate degree in history at Princeton and pursuing a graduate degree at Stanford, Barron then applied them to fiction.

Like legions of readers before her, from an early age Barron was drawn to Austen’s novels for the author’s wit and unpretentious commentary on the social milieu of her day. Barron sensed Austen’s interest in the then-infant art of detection. After reading the first Jane Austen mystery, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (1996), readers will see the connection as inevitable, a natural extension of Austen’s keen perceptions. Other writers might quail at creating fiction around a beloved figure from the literary cannon but Barron persisted and received congratulatory reviews. Barron’s love for her subject is most apparent in the dialogue in the Austen series; clearly, she hears Austen’s voice as she writes.

In The White Garden, Barron chose to write about another cherished author, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and her one-time lover Vita Sackville-West. The gap in historical fact sparking Barron’s narrative intrigues; a three-week period between when Leonard Woolf found his wife’s farewell note indicating her intention of committing suicide and the discovery of her body floating in the River Ouse. To fill the space Barron weaves a tangle of intricate pathways joining London, Oxford and Cambridge; Woolf, a secret Cambridge society founded in 1820 and a Nazi spy; and 21-st century landscape designer Jo Bellamy, Bellamy’s grandfather and Sackville-West’s White Garden.

Barron narrates her story through chapters alternating from the present day to the weeks after Woolf’s supposed departure from her home in the Sussex village of Rodmell, Monk’s House. Dated March 24, 1941, Woolf’s final diary entry yields no insights into her plans, yet she left Monk’s House four days later. No one has traced her steps, but her walking stick was found on the bank of the river. On April 18, Woolf’s drowned body surfaced in the river. As World War II progressed and she completed work on her last novel, Between the Acts, Woolf became more remote and depressed. As Woolf had a history of breakdowns and suicide attempts, the first resulting from her mother’s 1895 death, those who knew her believed that Woolf had, at last, accomplished her objective.

More than half a century later, Bellamy arrives at Sissinghurst Castle, the home of novelist and avid gardener Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson. Charged by a wealthy client to recreate Sissinghurst’s White Garden at his Long Island retreat, Bellamy has her own stake in Sissinghurst’s history; like Woolf, her grandfather, who grew up in Kent and worked at Sackville-West’s childhood home at knole and later at the castle, committed suicide. Her grandfather’s death just after Bellamy told him of her trip to Sissinghurst leaves her with a heavy weight of guilt. Again, Barron forms a question that fuels a page-turning plot: What happened in 1941 at Sissinghurst that might haunt a man as he established a new life in America?

Readers familiar with Woolf’s novels, her place among Bloomsbury notables and the groups’ profound impact on the arts will, likely, savor Barron’s recreation of the era. From Woolf’s sister, artist Vanessa Bell, and her husband, Clive Bell, to Vanessa’s lover Duncan Grant and economist John Maynard Keynes, Bloomsbury members appear on the pages of Barron’s novel not as ghosts, but alive with all of the power they wielded during the first half of the twentieth century. Scholars, rare book collectors, writers and gardeners will find much to delight in Barron’s novel, particularly a rapacious professor of feminist literature at Magdalen College, Oxford; a rare-book expert at Sotheby’s with insight into auction house shenanigans; references to Woolf’s novels, diaries and letters; and lovely descriptions of the White Garden. Quotations from, for example, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) and Sackville-West’s gardening columns in the London Observer; and multiple meanings of the word “screed” possibly affecting the tale’s conclusion make The White Garden a treasure trove for armchair detectives. One caveat: Immersed in the sounds and sights of Woolf’s world, readers may find the dialogue of contemporary characters a bit clumsy.

Nevertheless, The White Garden will appeal to a broader audience soon invested in Bellamy’s personal struggles: deep sadness at her grandfather’s death, resistance to her powerful client’s amorous overtures, and search for love while maintaining her independence. As such, Bellamy and Woolf share a desire for freedom in its many manifestations. In Barron’s vision, the desparing Woolf sought life. Just as, in her tower room at Sissinghurst, Sackville-West dreamed of growing a garden as war threatened her paradise. In light of this vision, it seems quite plausible that, rather than walk into the river, Woolf might have fled to her friend, Vita, whose name in Latin means “life.” Barron portrays a woman uncertain of her intentions as she leaves the man who so minutely managed her life:

“Later, in her fur coat and galoshes, her walking stick in one hand, she traversed the drowned meadows to the river.

A bird was perched on a fence-post, not ten feet away, trilling despite the bombs: Life! Life! Life!“

Strange Music by Laura Fish (Vintage, 2010)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

Far better known for her poetry while she lived, in recent decades English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) has been embraced by feminists connecting Browning’s struggles with an autocratic father and a family history of slaveholding to oppression against women of all classes and races in patriarchal societies. Many view Browning’s passionate commitment to emancipation as her greatest achievement. Certainly, Browning’s position as a physically frail and frequently agitated woman governed by strong white males fits well within the scheme. Yet as eldest daughter of wealthy Jamaican plantation owner Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, Browning was far from powerless, and she seems to have derived a passive power from illness as well. The many contradictions in Browning’s personality provide an intriguing field of study. For example, she is known to have questioned women’s intellectual equality but studied and translated Greek and Latin classics, and she abhorred the suffering she detected in stories brought back from Jamaica by her brother and cousin but promoted the ideal of the Christian martyr. As an artist, of course, her primary source of power was imagination. Weakened by laudanum and the leeches and “blistering” treatments applied by doting physicians, Browning made most of her acute observations from bed and couch.

Strange Music is Laura Fish’s own imaginative spin on Browning’s life during the nearly three years she spent recovering from a respiratory condition in a rented house in Torquay, beginning in 1838.1 Adopted by Guyanese and Jamaican parents, Fish was raised in England by white foster parents. In her twenties, Fish met her biological father, who was staying in a house in Jamaica once owned by the Barretts. Within the treasure trove of remnants left there by the Barrett family, Fish discovered the subject of her second novel. As a transracial woman separated from her biological mother, Fish shares much with the two dispossessed women whose narratives counterpoint Browning’s letters and journal entries as Strange Music unfolds.2 In the voices of Browning, Creole housekeeper Kaydia and field hand Sheba, Fish relates painful circumstances too heavy to bear; emotional wounds too raw to heal; human losses too great to survive; and disappointments too numerous to overcome. Post-colonial feminists have championed Strange Music and placed it alongside such classics of the genre as Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, a fictionalized account of the Creole woman who became the first Mrs. Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Strange Music links Fish to Browning as well; the pure poetry of the author’s rendering of island dialect and descriptions of Jamaica’s lush landscape reveal Fish a poet and, given the moral implications imbedded in her words, one whom Browning could admire.

Fish’s first novel, Flight of Black Swans (1995), followed a young black British woman of Creole roots, raised by white parents in England, as she travels through Australia’s northwestern territory. The main character’s life changes course after she encounters aboriginal stockmen in the remote Kimberley region and works with them on a cattle ranch. First published in 2008 in the U.K. (Jonathan Cape), Strange Music continues Fish’s exploration of personal and communal loss, oppression and identity as divergent cultures interact.3 To introduce Strange Music, she quotes Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997): “No one is born fully-formed: It is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.”4 Keeping Freire’s words in mind as they move through Strange Music, readers will marvel at the inner strength of individuals deprived of human dignity and self-determination.

For centuries, the Barrett family, part Creole, owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. Four years after the 1834 emancipation of the country’s native and African slaves, the lives of freed blacks had not improved. The conditions for workers on the Barrett estate, Cinnamon Hill, were typical; no longer the personal property of their resentful former owners, workers received less pay, were charged for rent and food, and continued to be mistreated. Sheltered in Torquay, Browning feels the effects as they appear in her distant, care-worn father and brother Sam, who has been discharged to Cinnamon Hill to manage the Barrett holdings with their cousin Richard. For the most part, readers will sympathize with Browning’s lengthy list of troubles: Sam’s steep moral decline; Mr. Barrett’s preoccupation with financial ruin; her physicians’ restrictions on reading and writing; the sale of her beloved family home, Hope End, a 500-acre estate in Hertfordshire; fear that favorite brother, “Bro,” would be called away from Torquay; and frustration with her health. Still mourning the sudden loss of her mother a decade earlier, Browning is sad and lonely, and not above using her illness as an excuse to continue her study of Latin and Greek classics and secure ample time for her musings. Daily doses of laudanum (a mixture of opium and alcohol) keep her lethargic and provoke disturbing dreams. When considered against the lives of Kaydia and Sheba, Browning’s unrelenting self-judgment might seem indulgent.

Creole housekeeper Kaydia’s story centers on Sam’s abuse of her daughter. Knowing the ways of white plantation owners with their many illegitimate offspring, Kaydia hopes to divert drunken Sam’s attentions to herself but then becomes pregnant with Sam’s child. Meanwhile, Sheba is suffering the loss of her lover, Isaac, who disappeared after protesting the low wages Sam pays to his laborers. Fish narrates their stories in a distinctive language that demands readers to become immersed in the sound, rather than sense, of the words. For example, as Kaydia watches her dying master, for whom she exists only in the roles he creates, she says: “What’s past don’t go. Don’t grow thin. But I feel small stone of hope snug in my belly. Lightness streams into my head while heart-searing sadness swells in my chest. If joy and fear can live together, they do, now, within me.” And reflecting on the impossibility of removing slavery’s fingerprint by destroying its tangible evidence, a mixed-race child, Sheba says: “Sky turns a deep mango colour, red-purple streaks flare across. A feeling fills my body of holding you at night, Isaac, safe safe safe. But even this leaves me nowhere stranded. Sadness stained.”

Fish found the title for her novel in a letter to Browning from her future husband, poet Robert Browning, from 1845. Eloping with her to Italy, Robert Browning helped his new wife acquire the independence she so coveted while a prisoner of her father, brothers and doctors.5 Although Browning’s poems had many admirers, including author Mary Russell Mitford and poets William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle and Edgar Allan Poe, she esteemed Robert’s approval above all. In turn, in his letter he wrote of the “fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought” in her work. Readers, too, will hear this “fresh strange music” in Fish’s novel. Like the melodies at play in Browning’s poems, Fish’s music derives from the rhythms of her characters’ hearts. Through the act of becoming, the “self-experience” referenced by Freire, these shattered hearts continue to beat. Broken beyond repair, yet they pulse with unquenchable life.

At the request of American abolitionists, Browning wrote “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” while living with her husband in Italy.6 Voiced by an escaping black woman slave in America, the poem, reproduced in the back of Fish’s novel, proves that the physically frail Browning had a goliath’s imaginative power. Similarly, Fish has listened long and well for the voices of Kaydia and Sheba. The rhythms thus captured are chilling.

1 Located on the Devonshire coast, Torquay was named and claimed by notable Victorians (Rudyard Kipling and Charles Kingsley, for example) and is considered to be the “English Riviera.”

2 In an author’s note, Fish explains that Barrett’s narrative in Strange Music includes extracts from the poet’s diaries and correspondence with family and friends, freely edited and adapted to Fish’s purpose. Commentators on Fish’s fiction have described the work as “bio-fiction,” as it moves from a skeleton of fact to a fully fashioned imagining of emotional experience.

3 Strange Music appears on the longlist for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction, which was created by U.K. mobile communications firm Orange to spotlight the work of women outside the radar of traditional review and mass-market media.

4 Author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (first published in Portuguese in 1968) and The Politics of Education (1985), Freire left his native Brazil after the 1964 military coup. Subsequently, he taught in Chile and at Harvard and served as a consultant to UNESCO and the World Council of Churches.

5 As there were far too many Brownings (legitimate and otherwise) to claim a stake in the family’s fortunes, Browning’s father insisted that his children not marry. He disinherited her after she wed.

6 First printed in the 1848 edition of the American publication Liberty Bell, the poem was reprinted in 1849 in a Florence newspaper and a book of the same title. Browning revised the poem for an edition of her works published in 1850.

Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott (Spiegel & Grau, 2007)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

Author Rebecca Stott is preoccupied by the ever-shifting boundaries of time and elusive nature of scientific concepts. Above these concerns in her spellbinding literary creations lingers obsession, the all-consuming desires that drive men and women to achieve great things and enter doomed love affairs.

In her biography of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Darwin and the Barnacle (2003), for example, Stott narrowed her vision on an early but critical force behind Darwin’s theory of evolution, his obsession with a particular form of crustacean. As Publishers Weekly said in a review of the book, “If he had died in 1854, [Darwin] would have been remembered as the author of a groundbreaking four-volume study of all the different shapes and sexual variants that these crustaceans exhibit.” And in Stott’s latest novel, The Coral Thief, set in the summer of 1815 just after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, a young Scottish anatomy student studying in Paris is drawn into a series of thefts centered on an obsession with a highly sought-after fossil-like marine organism.

In Ghostwalk, Stott adds the scientific theory of entanglement to a heady concotion of mystery, murder, intrigue and passion. Seemingly, the master magician behind the unsettling events in which writer Lydia Brooke becomes entangled is English mathematician and natural philosopher Isaac Newton (1642-1747). Most of Newton’s biographers have focused on his major scientific discoveries: the law of universal gravitation, the full-color composition of white light, and the principles leading to modern calculus. Newton studied at Cambridge University in England in the 17th century, was elected fellow of Trinity College in 1667 and then appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. Stott’s vision of 17th-century Cambridge during Newton’s years there coinciding with the English Plague (1665-1665) provides a robust context for her page-turner. Without a doubt, Ghostwalk qualifies as a bona fide mass-market hit.

Stott’s tale begins when Brooke travels from Brighton to Cambridge to attend a funeral. Cambridge University scholar Elizabeth Vogelsang, the mother of Brooke’s former lover, has died just as she was concluding her controversial biography of Newton. When Brooke lived in Cambridge, she noted Vogelsang’s ability to inhabit a subject. In fact, Vogelsang seemed to live in the 17th century. Asked by Vogelsang’s son, Cambridge neuroscientist Cameron Brown, to complete his mother’s work, Brooke reluctantly agrees. So begins a series of incidents that Brooke hopes are coincidences, figments of her imagination and mere dreams. Eventually, Brooke comes to believe with Vogelsang that time is a palimpsest, a fluid layering of people, places and events fueled by a force known in modern science as “entanglement.” A term used in quantum theory, entanglement predicts the manner in which particles of energy and matter will continue to interact even after separation.

Brown’s request ignites their still-simmering romance, forcing Brooke to consider, at last, his Machiavellian effect on her. Currently leading a team at Cambridge developing a new drug, he tells her, to treat depression, Brown weaves through Brooke’s life. He makes nocturnal visits to her at his mother’s studio where she is completing Vogelsang’s manuscript; sends text messages to her computer; and leaves voice messages on her phone. Together or apart, they cannot act without the other being impacted. Frightened by strange light effects in Vogelsang’s studio and Brown’s control over her, Brooke resists his possible role in an international conspiracy masked as a war between animal-rights activists and enlightened scientists.

In an author’s note, Stott explains her method of bridging historical fact and fictional narratives to fill historical black holes. Like Vogelsang, a fictional character who employs supernatural means to probe deeper, Stott has wrestled with facts and toyed with scenarios. Yet a true story, Stott knows, is not always the most plausible one. Newton’s biographers have avoided the curious murders of Trinity fellows and prominent alchemists that bookend Newton’s appointment as professor. But Stott suggests that Newton’s obsession with alchemy is as inextricably entangled with his scientific discoveries as are the 17th and 21st centuries; the deaths of Trinity scholars and animals used for scientific inquiry; completion of Vogelsang’s magnum opus and her fall down a staircase that no longer exists; and the helix-like spiral of Brooke’s and Brown’s fates.

A professor of English literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, Stott is a gifted writer. She plays with multiple meanings, using words and their varying connotations as investigative tools. For example, when Brown sends a message to Brooke, stating that she seems to be hanging in the air in which he walks, she considers if she is hanging, “like a spider on a single thread of its own making or like a woman hanged for a crime or like a torture victim or a slab of curing meat or, or, like mist rising from a river…? Hanging. Hanging on. Hanging in. Hanging fire. Hanging up.” Similarly, Stott practices verbal alchemy as Brooke ponders multiple implications of such words as lie, embroil and entangle.

Period illustrations and maps, a list of “sins” recorded by Newton in code in 1662 (decoded in 1963 by Newton biographer Richard Westfall), and recipes from one of Newton’s notebooks for mixing colors and curing sickness, amplify Stott’s persuasive portrait of Newton and his Cambridge. Fearless in pursuit of answers to his burning questions, Newton explored optics by using an instrument to probe his eye socket, nearly blinding himself by staring too much at the sun. He considered alchemy a powerful means to answer scientific questions of great consequence. While they might not feel the same impetus toward science, surely readers will recognize the alchemy involved in intimate relationships. A layering of desires so entangled one cannot tell where one ends and another begins, Ghostwalk is a rare treat, a book with the power to enlighten as it entertains.