Ever read anything by Richard Powers? Even know the name? For someone like me whose research domaine is memory, who is deeply interested in music and who is probably more defined by “head than heart” (as he is often accused of) he is a favorite author.

I chanced into my first encounter with his work at the library: The Goldbug Variations in 1991, during a difficult pregnancy, a full teaching load and the demands of a lovely, temperamental toddler. Science with a science fiction slant, composed in the form of a Bach fugue, call and response through generations, rich with philosophical questions, fun literary and musical references – all a welcome focus and distraction. Burying my head in a book when life got overwhelming did the trick, once again.

I have been a fan ever since. I admire someone digging deep to learn new science and facts that he then weaves into his narratives; I am grateful for someone who is willing to write difficult books – which they undoubtedly are – in the age of beach reading. I can even take excursions into spirituality  –The Echo Maker (Memory, Ornithology!), Orféo (Music), Generosity (Gene manipulation)- when they come packaged within the larger philosophical issues of determinism. My enthusiasm, however, is not universally shared. He won prizes, yes, but a lot of the smart critics over the years have really torn into him, with snarky reviews found in the New Yorker and elsewhere.

And now he has a new book out, (84 holds in front of me at the Multnomah County Library….) that I can’t wait to read: The Overstory (Environmental issues anchored around trees.) Below is a NYT review by Barbara Ehrenreich that glows.

First I thought, maybe this time the review is positive since it is written by a woman – and Powers always struck me as a writer who could be a woman – but that speculation was shot down when I saw Tim Martin’s admiring review in The Independent.

https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/deep-roots-36801794.html

James Wood from the New Yorker, some years back, judged the work to be too cerebral, focussed on larger issues rather than making the characters come alive for the reader. Does not strike me as true.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/05/brain-drain

For reviewers looking at Orféo, a story about DNA research, Mahler and Messiaen, not necessarily in that order, the verdict was: too gooey! Did not strike me as true, either.

“It seems that the Powers Problem — producing novels that are more head than heart — has here turned into its opposite.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/books/review/orfeo-by-richard-

So: contradictions, unsolved.  I’ll report back on the new book once I get my hands on it.

Beware of the mother who gives her non-German speaking child the middle name of Heinrich. Never mind, that it runs in the family, and that it was the name of the few German authors who truly stood against the menace of their times: Heinrich Heine and Heinrich Mann. Who would want to live with a name one can hardly pronounce?

Heinrich Mann is one of my favorite authors; he managed to turn his opposition to German nationalistic outrage against democratic values, liberalism and rational thinking into artful satire. His seminal novel, The Loyal Subject, was written between 1906 and 1914, skewering the Wilhelmian epoch and presaging the rise of an authoritarian state. That title, by the way, is one of many translations for the same book.

Mann himself joked that “every time the Germans loose a war, they publish my book.” And the English titles were echoing the Zeitgeist: The Patrioteer (1921), Little Superman (1945), Man of Straw (1947, 1972, 1984) – sort of in tandem with the interest in nationalism, fascism and eventually the authoritarian personality.

(No wonder the book in full form was first published in Russia…)

The novel describes the rise of a small town parvenue who learns to love his emperor Wilhelm II, to outsmart the competition and destroy his liberal home environment in favor of rising nationalistic power. He himself is weak, but desires to be hard, brown nosing his superiors while mistreating those below. He adores and condones violence as long as he is not its victim, except for masochistic tendencies in the bedroom. He is the reincarnation of conformism. The book provided an early blueprint for Adorno’s authoritarian personality, but was more than that. Mann understood and conveyed the roles that capitalism and the ideology of German imperialism played in the destruction of enlightenment ideals. (Which is part of why Heinrich and Thomas Mann really didn’t get along…..)

Now, why am I bringing all this to your attention? Because for years I have been photographing what you see in today’s musings: ubiquitous, varied forms of Lieb Sein glued to or sprayed onto the walls of the cities. The literal translation is: Be nice.  And it could be seen as a playful instruction to increase peace in the world and diminish conflict. Or put some innocuous color into the world. However, every German child knows that the words “Sei lieb!” are the equivalent of “You better obey!” Are these stickers satire then, encouraging disobedience in sly form? I’ve yet to find out. Probably overthinking it, as per usual – yet for the political mind it rings slightly ominous.

The stickers do, regardless, remind me of the quote attributed to some old Prussian:

The loyal subject is forbidden to measure the actions of the authorities with the yardstick of the subject’s limited insight.

I guess I have limited insight into the meanings of graffiti, however I put any yardstick I want to my evaluation of governmental   action….. in Germany and anywhere else!

Here is a clip from the movie Tales of Hollywood where Alec Guiness plays Heinrich Mann.

Auf Wiedersehen!

A decade or so after my progeny finished high school I am still in awe of their stellar English teacher and lucky enough to be on her list for book recommendations. That way I read Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing this spring and was quite taken by it. The 2016 reviews were picky if benevolent, and not much in line with my own strong emotional reactions to the tale, or more precisely, the tale’s characters. (Clicking on picture should open NYT review….)

The novel describes the lives of several generations of offspring of two African half-sisters, born into different tribes. It takes place on both continents, Africa and America, linked by slavery, and reaches into our own time. I learned quite a bit about Africa, but most importantly I was amazed by the literary craft of creating characters that throughout time and place were memorable and demanded empathy, easily given. In addition, though, the novel describes sensitively and painfully issues of relocation – both forced, in the context of slavery, and half-voluntarily, in the context of the Jim-Crow South, the call of the job-promising North, the call of the US to educated modern-day Africans, and the call home to Africa for those with ancestral roots there.

Seeking a different life on a different continent is, of course, familiar to me in my own biography. But the pressures did not come close to what another novel supposedly brilliantly describes: the search of a young, drug-addicted, gay Black man from Chicago for a better future in the Berlin of the 1980s. Darryl Pinckney’s novel Black Deutschland came with glowing reviews when published last year at the same time as Homegoing. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/books/review/darryl-pinckneys-black-deutschland.html 

What sold me, however, to put it on my reading list, was this bit in the Kirkus Reviews: “What sustains your attention . . . is Pinckney’s dolefully witty and incisively observant voice, whether describing the quirks of his hero’s family (‘When the going gets rough, make pancakes,’ Jed’s father advises) or evoking the sights, sounds, and even smells of West Berlin, ‘the involuntary island, that petri dish of romantic radicalism.’ Pinckney’s discursive novel, coming across as if it were a late-20th-century hipster version of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Marte Laurids Brigge, typifies an era in which inventive, idiosyncratic styles flourish anew in African-American writing.”  

Who can resist a hipster version of Rilke????