Ludwig van Beethoven’s music is such a presence on the programs of local orchestras and Boston is such an old city that the thought of the great man walking through Back Bay is more plausible than not. Of course, in his fifty-six years, Beethoven never left Europe. But he could have – and that possibility forms the basis of Paul Griffiths’ touching, witty, and thought-provoking new novel, Mr. Beethoven.
In these depths, which often are close to deaths, any notion of happiness has ebbed or evaporated entirely; indeed, circumstances can be so desperate that there seems no way back to shore. What can help in such moments? Certainly not a texted smiley face. Mental-health professionals and their pills might also be inadequate. “They treat our suffering as an illness from which we need to recover,” Ignatieff writes. “Yet when suffering becomes understood as an illness with a cure, something is lost.” His book is an ambitious restoration project, a survey course of Eurocentric anguish from Job to the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.
A year after publishing “Obit,” Chang is still writing about her grief. Now, however, she is speaking not only of loss but also to it: her new book, “Dear Memory”, is made up of letters—to the dead and the living, to family and friends, to teachers, and, ultimately, to the reader. She has given up the authority of the third person for the vulnerability of direct address. If “Obit” sought a container for loss, “Dear Memory” is a messier formal experiment, an open-ended inquiry not of a bounded life but of an ongoing present, full of longing and imperfection.
A project that started out as a fairly straightforward travelogue has become something stranger and more interesting under the heightened pressure applied by the constraints of the pandemic.
Now that I too am
the terrible witness
to the ovum