#804 Exposition- Rebecca Makkai

#804 Exposition- Rebecca Makkai

Another stunning story about the undying power of music. This is written as a transcript of a recording. A spy is being interviewed by his superiors about his last mission. He attended the concert of an enemy pianist, Sophia Speri. It was an illegal concert where she was performing outlawed music.

“It was hypnotic. The Music. The very reason it has been banned, I’m sure. It hypnotized, it entranced, it gave the listener visions of worlds beyond the borders of…the human heart.”

The concert took place in secret hall entirely in the dark. It was supposed to be her last concert, she presumably knew she would be caught and executed. She was shot and killed on stage by the spy ten minutes into the show. She didn’t stop playing even when the gun was put to her head.

The spy is trying to convince the interrogator that he did not enjoy the music, couldn’t remember the music. He was clearly moved by the performance and can’t explain why he waited ten minutes to kill the pianist instead of immediately. The musician is dead, but the music and the defiance lived on.

Notable Passage: “Not to unhear music, but to forget it. Are they not the same?”

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total= 38

#697 A Bird in the House- Rebecca Makkai

#697 A Bird in the House- Rebecca Makkai

An estranged couple living halfway across the world meet for the last time in Chicago for the birth of their grand-daughter. A sparrow flies through the room, jarring and ominous, but not without elegance. This two-page interlude has more beauty and well-sculpted symbolism than most novels achieve, proving to all aspiring writers that a story should be as long as it needs to be, not as long as you can make it.

“In almost any culture, it’s an omen: of death, or of a birth, or a journey. Sometimes a bird in the house is said to be the ghost of the recently departed. We aren’t capable of seeing it rationally –especially as it falls in love with itself in our windows, as it flaps frantically past family portraits, as it kills itself against our walls.”

“The longest feathers stayed between her fingers as the bird flew on, raining small, perfect circles of blood on the kitchen tiles, on the flesh of the peeled apples…”

In this project where I’m only reading one story a day, I’m getting Makkai stories only periodically. I think that’s perfect. It’s like getting rare bottle of whiskey. You want only a taste every once in a while to keep on your tongue. Too much and you’d risk emptying the bottle too soon. This collection is just about perfect, I want it to last for a while.

Rating: 10-8-9-9 Total= 36

#586 Painted Ocean, Painted Ship- Rebecca Makkai

#586 Painted Ocean, Painted Ship- Rebecca Makkai

An albatross is a harbinger of bad fortune. When Alex, convinced to go hunting for the first time, accidentally shot and killed one of these majestic birds, misfortune was on its way. It wasn’t enough that she had to pay a huge fine, or that the story made it onto the campus newspaper where she was a tenure-tracked professor, or that she was the butt of jokes at every faculty function—her penance for the albatross would touch her career and her engagement too.

She decided to try to roll with it and started telling the story herself at parties: “The telling was an attempt, of course, at penance. It never did work; penance so rarely does.”

The irony of teaching Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner was not lost on her. But in the attempts to forget her mistake, she makes a bigger one in class. She accidentally assumes a quiet student of hers is from Korea, when in reality she is from Minnesota and of Chinese descent. The gaffe creates a stir on campus and Alex goes into a tailspin that ends in her dismissal from her position. 

“The point, the moral, was how easy it was to make assumptions, how deadly your mistake could be, How in failing to recognize something, you could harm it or kill it or at least fail to save it.”

This is some of the point. The other, perhaps more important point is that we all make mistakes. It’s how we act after those mistakes that determines the course of our lives, not the mistake itself.

“I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#515 Everything We Know About the Bomber- Rebecca Makkai

#515 Everything We Know About the Bomber- Rebecca Makkai

Once again, I really want to urge people to read this collection, Music for Wartime. This is a string of paragraphs of the bits of stuff we learn from the barrage of TV news coverage during a bombing—it’s disaster porn. The needless facts about a bombers life, the endless ephemera that gest thrown at us keep our attention.

This isn’t exactly a new idea, but Makkai does it perfectly, shapes a reality of reality television that shouldn’t look like a fun house mirror but does anyway. Any coverage of a horrible attack or a bombing or a shooting somehow devolves quickly into a lesson on how NOT to cover the news. There is no way we need to know about a third grade report card of an alleged mass murderer…but there it is BREAKING NEWS: KILLER FAILED ART CLASS AS A KID!

What’s worse is that “News” stations are willing to get it wrong, and then correct later. They report a rumor about a person that ends up being false (and sometimes ends with death threats of an innocent person) and don’t think it’s morally reprehensible because they weren’t trying to report facts, they were merely relaying quotes from involved persons near the scene.

Important topic, great social commentary here. In a collection filled with war stories from past generations, the juxtaposition of something this current is powerful.

Notable Passage: “We plan to learn more. We plan to keep updated. We plan to look for patterns…we will repeat these facts till they sound like history. We’ll repeat them till they sound lie fate.”

Rating: 9-7-9-9 Total= 34

#443 Acolyte (Second Legend)- Rebecca Makkai

#443 Acolyte (Second Legend)- Rebecca Makkai

How much can you hide? Using grease paint and old clothes to make the young look old, to avoid the advances of the foreign soldiers; wearing a star of David to get into he ghetto, then using the papers to get out. Changing names and identities for mere survival. If you do it long enough, who are you?

“But to claim one ancestor would be to claim them all, even those on the wrong sides of humanity’s decisive moral battles. The slave owners, the anti-Semites, the Huns, the cowards.”

They sneak an anti communist novel out of Hungary. Trying to write about these things can be tricky. How much truth to put down, when half of what you are writing was about hiding the truth?

“There are stranger things true. There are simpler things not.”

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34

#403 Couple of Lovers on Red Background- Rebecca Makkai

#403 Couple of Lovers on Red Background- Rebecca Makkai

She is going through a loss, grief or just a mental crisis, but the narrator is having a delusion, quite a great delusion in fact. She believes that Johan Sebastian Bach has come back to live, came out of her piano and is now living in her apartment.

It’s a charming story, the narrator goes through all the mind experiments you would expect to make the story work. What CD’s would Back listen to? You should probably turn off the TV, that much of a technology and cultural leap would shock him back to death.

Whether this is just a dream she was having after hitting her head, or a mental coping mechanism to get over a tough break-up, the metaphor of her literally living with the music she loves is a strong one.

Rating: 8-9-9-9 Total= 35

#383 Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart- Rebecca Makkai

#383 Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart- Rebecca Makkai

Peter suffered through a performers worst nightmare. In the middle of a performance of Richard III, he forgot how to act. The words came out, but they were only his own. He never recovered his talent.

He looked to his childhood friend and first love for support. But even he couldn’t help, all he could see was this great actor and the parts he once played: “I wonder how that colored our friendship, that I saw him simultaneously as both Peter and Hamlet. If nothing, it made me more tolerant of his ramblings.”

As Peter failed in his final attempt at a comeback, he mused on the his futility and rationalized his leaving the art world by belittling art itself:

“We’re living in this terrible world with wars and broken hearts and starvation, but some of us are compelled to make art, like that’s supposed to help anything.”

Perhaps we do take the arts too seriously. In this collection we are surrounded by tales of horror and death, see the utter destruction war has on the physical and spiritual endeavors of the human race. But then I am reminded that the first story in this collection, the one that set the tone for all of these tales that place art as the pinnacle of hope, something to risk our lives to save. Art endures, or does it?

“Something used to be here, something beautiful and towering that overshadowed us all, and it seemed so important at the time. And now look: I cant even remember its name.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#352 The Briefcase- Rebecca Makkai

#352 The Briefcase- Rebecca Makkai

A chef is among 100 prisoners, chained together, being marched through town. He was caught giving aid to rebels, although all he did was feed people who sat at his table. He was after all, a chef. Somehow he escapes his binding, but that leaves the chain, one man short. The guards arrest the nearest man, a professor, strip him of his briefcase, and clothes and add him unjustly to the prison ranks.

The chef, after all the prisoners leave, picks up the professors briefcase and creates a new life in exile. He spends his time reading the professors papers on the nature of the universe. For months, he eats, sleeps and ruminates philosophically on existence:

“The light of my cigarette is a fire like the sun. From where I sit, all the universe is equidistant from my cigarette. Ergo, my cigarette is the center of the universe. My cigarette is on earth. Ergo, the earth is the center of the universe. If all heavenly bodies move, they must therefore move in relation to the earth, and in relation to my cigarette.”

Of course, not having any training in physics or science, his theories about the cosmos were all wrong, but it didn’t matter, did it? The war had flipped the world upside-down and…“The universe has been folded inside out.”

When you literally can no longer be yourself, who are you? Where are you? Why are we here?

Notable Passage: “History was safer than the news, because there was no question of how it would end.”

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34

#341 Other Brands of Poison- Rebecca Makkai

#341 Other Brands of Poison- Rebecca Makkai

Family legends told decades later often change depending on who’s telling them, but the important parts stay the same.

“If the story is hazy, seventy years later, that is because it is his. If the details are strangely specific—the dialogue, the type of soup—that is because they are mine.”

As I rotate through the fifteen or so authors during this round of short stories, if becomes clear which collection I like best. I have a large stack of these books on my desk and I read one, I put it on the bottom of the stack, with the top book being tomorrow’s story. Each time I get to see Makkai on top, I know tomorrow’s read is going to be a good one.

Even short pieces like this one are filled with rich, deep, emotion. So far, Music For Wartime has been the find of this year.

Rating: 10-7-8-9 Total= 34

#320 The Miracle Years of Little Fork- Rebecca Makkai

#320 The Miracle Years of Little Fork- Rebecca Makkai

A town is in need during the war, it is dry with drought and in need of faith:

“These were the men who weren’t away at war, the lame or too-old, the too-young or asthmatic.”

Reverend Hewlett looked over Little Forks during these years, and took on an incredible burden, one he was called on to take. He knows the towns needs and knows its secrets. To take on this burden, he gave up his own needs, for a while.

The four elements of the world is the theme that runs through this whole story. Earth, wind, fire, and water. Things we all need, but not too much of one at once.

Notable Passage: “I thought I loved him. But if I loved him, I’d remember him better.”

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total= 30