Short Takes
The Kreutzer Sonata
By Margriet de Moor
Translated, from the Dutch, by Susan Massotty
Arcade, 168 pp., $19.95
Like Tolstoy's story of the same name, this brief novel throbs with passion. Employing a neat 19th-century framing device, the tale progresses from love to betrayal to attempted suicide and murder.
A young music historian meets a famous blind music critic on an airplane, where he hears the following story. The critic, as a student, had fallen madly in love. When he was callously betrayed and discarded, he shot himself in the head. The result was not desired death, but disabling blindness. Blind, he discovered his vocation, becoming a respected music critic. Twenty years later, he falls in love again. This time, the affair leads to marriage and family. But he remains in the grip of jealousy. "Being in love with your own wife is an appalling business, which transforms the entire world into a cavernous abyss of restlessness and dreams."
Tragic repetition threatens. The suspense is palpable, maintained through the narrative device of the listener hearing an interrupted account. This elegantly attenuated plot reminds us that those 19th-century novelists knew how to tell a tale.
Grace
By Linn Ullmann
Translated, from the Norwegian, by Barbara Haveland
Knopf, 144 pp., $20
Johan is dying. He is preoccupied not with God or his soul. He does not indulge in metaphysical musings. He never imagines an afterlife. What worries him is loss of control and dignity, humiliation and pain, spittle and smells.
He recalls bits of his past: his horsy first wife, run over and killed; his disappointing son, estranged over a trifle; his damaged newspaper career, ended when he is fired for carelessly plagiarizing a book review. He is grateful for Mai, his beautiful second wife, who, while brave and comforting, refuses to help him die. He must persuade her to change her mind.
Whether or not she will ease his way to death is the only suspense in the slender novel. The only other piece of plot is the deathbed reconciliation between father and son arranged by Mai and of little satisfaction to Johan.
Ullmann, the daughter of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, shares Bergman's cool view of the world. But the novel is not cold. It generates its own gentle heat.
How to Fall
By Edith Pearlman
Sarabande, 227 pp., paperback, $14.95
Godolphin, a fictional spur of Boston, is the setting for many of these stories. There Edith Pearlman discovers the remarkable in the everyday. In "Eyesore," Franny, a plain woman, transforms herself through contact lenses. Soon she has a glamorous job as a television news anchor. An eye infection, which makes her eyes squint and blur, reverses the transformation and returns her to her old life. Clara and Valerie, lesbian lovers, live contentedly together in "Signs of Life." Valerie becomes mysteriously sick and dies. Doctors and nurses attest to her demise. But she is recalled to life. Her resurrection, deemed a miracle, turns Godolphin Hill into a site of pilgrimage. Val claims to be divine. Clara retorts, "Balls. You are an ordinary woman who happens to have died."
Several of the stories dip back to just after World War II to a displaced persons camp in Germany. "Purim Night" at Camp Gruenwasser, organized by Sonya Sofrankovich, formerly of Rhode Island, is celebrated with a skit, starring Queen Esther wearing a beaded dress from her dead mother's wardrobe. Haman, the villain of the piece, appears only in paint, relief, or papier-mache, always wearing a little black moustache. The orchestra strums and blares. The costumes glitter and sway. One royal cloak is adorned "with little white fur tails which on close inspection turned out to be the inner stuff of sanitary napkins." The party, like the story that celebrates it, is a raucous and poignant success.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.
