When Herman Melville died in 1891, Moby-Dick had been out of print for decades. The process of rediscovery was a slow march that began in earnest just after World War I. Remembered primarily as a travel writer when he was remembered at all, Melville was soon recast as a proto-modernist, anticipating the literary developments soon to be undertaken by writers like James Joyce. The shifting, collage-like nature of Moby-Dick, alternating tragic monologues with low-rent sailor ditties, realistic descriptions of whaling with semi-parodic disquisitions on cetology, spoke to the moment aesthetically while the book’s depiction of a doomed, hyperviolent enterprise reflected the world-historical one.
With The Honeys, Ryan La Sala demonstrated that he understands everything there is to know about young adult horror, from the tone to the content to the characters to the themes. Now, with his latest book Beholder, he doubles down on the intensity and pushes the reader to their limits in a way that’s both thrilling and terrifying.
Utopia is in the eye of the beholder. For Sir Thomas More, who coined the word for his 1516 book of the same name, it meant a fictional island society carved out in a satirical image of perfection. For various back-to-nature communities it has meant an embrace of agrarian life and a decision to leave industrial society behind. And for Francis Ford Coppola, the subject of Sam Wasson’s new book, ”The Path to Paradise,” utopia meant changing the rules of how movies are made: multitaskers, freed from the regimentation of studios, constantly reinventing with an eye toward the future.
And for a while, it actually worked.
Sachs’s book, targeted to music-loving general readers, is less an impassioned defense of an indisputably influential composer than an earnest attempt by an engaging writer and insightful music historian to explain Schoenberg’s significant achievements and understand the lingering resistance to his works. These scores still “fascinate many people in the profession,” Sachs asserts, but “continue to meet with apathy, and often downright antipathy, on the part of most listeners.”