"The Man of Feeling" by Javier Marias

 A tenor, appearing in Verdi's Otello in Madrid, becomes friendly with Natalia Manur, wife of a rich man; they are staying, with their companion, in his hotel. Slowly, their relationship develops. 

The story is told in the first person from the point of view of the tenor and we are deep inside his head, treated to his interior monologue as he observes, and as he vacillates. He flicks between then and now, four years later. His thoughts are very discursive; he is rarely straightforward. In this, it is a spot-on successor to classics such as Tristram Shandy and Knut Hamsun's Hunger. Sometimes I found myself rather confused - and I think that might have been intended - in the long paragraphs which frequently stretch over more than a page. I don't think I would have finished it had it not been such a short book.

Although, given that the narration is buried so deep inside the narrator's consciousness, and given that he tells you the minutest detail, a lot happens.

Selected quotes:

• "the impression ... of a person quite prepared to smile for decades whether or not it was appropriate to do so." (p 3)
• "If you ever see a young man wearing a scarf around the end of June or the beginning of September, you can be sure that he's a singer." (p 27)
• "For the last person is the one who counts, thus, for example, it will be our last widow who will have to be consoled, and any inheritance we leave will almost always go to those who did not know us when we were young." (p 112)

September 2022; 133 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Lorenzo da Ponte" by Rodney Bolt

Lorenzo da Ponte was the librettist behind the Mozart operas The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte. But he was rather more than that. This man had an extraordinary life and met all sorts of people. This beautifully written biography captures something of the flavour of a man on whom fortune frequently shone but never for long.

He was born Emanuele Conegliano in a jewish ghetto in Ceneda which is now part of Vittorio Veneto in Italy; he and his father converted to Catholicism when Emanuele was fourteen and he took the bishop's name; he was later educated in a seminary and became an Abbe. But the young priest was a bit of a womaniser and followed his girlfriend to a Venice near the end of its glory days (“The mistress of the Mediterranean had become a spirited madame - ancient, decaying, but full-bent on giving her devotees the time of their lives.”; C 2) where he lived a dissolute life, writing poetry, gambling, participating in the new dance craze (the Waltz), and meeting Casanova, sharing with him the favours of a Murano nun. Eventually Venice expelled him so he travelled to Vienna, via a number of other ladies, where he charmed the Emperor into becoming poet at the Opera and working with Salieri (very unsuccessfully) and other composers and having his great triumphs with Mozart. In his forties he finally found a woman to marry (illegally, he was still a Catholic priest) and stopped fathering bastards on other women. He travelled across Europe, reacquainting himself with the now ageing Casanova, to London where he again worked at the Opera (for a man so cunning that although he only owned the leasehold of the land where the audience part of the opera house was built he owned the freehold of the land on which the stage was built) and ran a bookshop until he endorsed too many bad debts and had to flee England, following his wife and children to New York. Here he tried to develop a taste for opera in the city, also teaching Italian and meeting Clement Moore, who wrote The Night Before Christmas, and Longfellow (Hiawatha) among others. He spent sometime as a grocer and distiller in Sunbury in Pennsylvania (a town named after Sunbury-on-Thames where I grew up) before returning to New York. Throughout his long life he was repeatedly spectacularly unsuccessful in business after repeatedly reinventing himself and having a brilliant start. His energy and self-confidence was remarkable, as was his ability to make enemies. But what a life! Bolt compares him with a phoenix: “The phoenix ... invariably set fire to its own nest. Lorenzo Da Ponte was indeed a true phoenix. yet he also possessed that best-known attribute of the bird. Time and time again, he could rise from the ashes.” (C 11)

And beautifully told:
“The three Inquisitors of State were a sinister offshoot of the Council of Ten, the secretive executive branch of government that was ruling with growing disregard for the assembly of patricians, the Great Council. They worked swiftly and violently ... their network of spies had once given every keyhole an eye, wrought terror with the creak of a floorboard, and brought danger to every shadow.” (C 2)
“In Padua ... he found the cheapest Inn in town, and worked out that he could scrape by on one lire (twenty Venetian soldi) a day - eight soldi for a bed, five for a coffee, and seven for a diet of bread and salty black olives, which would make him drink large quantities of water to fill his stomach.” (C 3) Isn’t it interesting how many currencies of the time had the ‘twenty shillings to a pound’ system: the Venetian 20 soldi to a lire, the English twenty shillings to a pound, also called a libra, and the French, twenty sous to a livre. The French and English also subdivided the sou or shilling into twelve denarii, or pence; I wonder if there were twelve somethings to the soldi?
“For most of 1785 ... [Mozart and Da Ponte] circled warily, like dogs about to settle in the same basket.” (C 8)
“Travelling to Paris in late 1792 with the letter bearing a recommendation from Mary Antoinette was not the wisest of moves.” (C 12)
“In Dresden, Da Ponte paid off his young coachman (who had clung to him tenaciously, despite their lack of conveyance) with a pair of fine leather breeches.” (C 12)
“The Italians exalt music; the French enliven it; the Germans strive after it; the English pay for it well.” (C 12)
“Castrati had long since given away to tenors ... even in England opponents of Italian opera reserved special venom for the practice (though, it must be said, far more often on grounds of their improbability in heroic roles than for humanitarian reasons).” (C 13)
“The quaint old man from a distant world had vitality enough to engage them together with the respectability of a venerable culture, for those uncertain moments when young adventurers had to look back over their shoulders for reassurance.” (C 15)

Swahbuckling! May 2019; 333 pages

"The Sandman" by E T A Hoffmann

In  this short novel, Nathanael grows up to fear the Sandman, the bogeyman who sprinkles sand into the eyes of children when they don't fall asleep; he then steals the eyes and takes them back to feed his family who live in a nest in the half-moon. As a child he identifies the Sandman with his father's friend, Coppelius, with whom his father practises alchemy.

After his father's death from one of these experiments, Nathanael grows up and becomes a student. Here he is terrorised by barometer salesman Coppola, who is the very image of Coppelius, and who sells him a telescope. He uses the telescope to spy on Olimpia, the pretty daughter of his Physics teacher, who sits in the window opposite his. He becomes obsessed with Olimpia, forgetting his childhood sweetheart Clara. He dances with Olimpia at a ball, despite the fact that she scarcely says anything other than "Ah ah ah" and she is very stiff and stylised in her movements. Sure enough, she is revealed to be an automaton and Nathanael goes mad.

This story is the basis for the first act of Offenbach's Tales from Hoffmann; another of Hoffmann's short stories became the basis for Tschaikovsky's Nutcracker ballet.

The story has in interesting structure. It starts with three letters written by Nathanael; although the author claims that this means that he starts in media res, in the middle of things, these letters actually recount the back story of Nathanael's childhood. The narrator then begins the second portion of the story, the student days; this has a conventional narrative structure. It ends with the destruction of the automaton and Nathanael recovering from his madness. But wait! This is not the end. In a final postscript Nathanael tries to murder Clara and then kills himself. At this stage I wondered whether Hoffman had tried out the happy ending and didn't like it so added another; it felt a little like a false appendix.

The whole tone of the story reminded me very much of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther; it was as fatalistically despairing, a hero doomed from the start. Fortunately, it was much shorter.

Unfortunately, I found the whole thing so over the top and hysterical that I couldn't believe in the sinister characters.

October 2015; 73 pages

Supplement, January 2016
I have read Nicholas Royle's The Uncanny. He points out (p 39) the multiple identity confusion:

• The Sandman
• The advocate Coppelius who is repellent
• The narrator's father who has a repulsive face and who practises alchemy with Coppelius
• The barometer salesman who looks like Coppelius but is called Coppola

Royle (p 46) thinks that Freud missed a lot of the meaning of the Sandman, including the passage which presages Freud's description of the death drive, when  Clara speaks of "a dark power which strives to ruin us within our own selves".

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Glyndebourne"

I wouldn't normally read a book about an opera house but the publishers were suggesting we might write a book about our school and this was the sample they offered us.

The first chapter explained how Glyndebourne was conceived. A very rich man was owner of a stately home and fell in love with an opera singer; the Glyndebourne Festival was a sort of extravagant am dram. The book managed to combine a tone of reverence with smugness; this seems to perfectly suit opera afficionadoes.

The first chapter was slightly interesting although I wanted to know more about the source of the wealth. I suppose I am a philistine.

The later chapters degenerated into long lists of operas staged and performers involved: In 1957 Svengali's Don Giuseppe was performed; ingenue Janet Sodastream was a memorable soprano; the set design was conceived by Charley Farley. That sort of thing. To someone like myslef who doesn't know his Figaro from his Barber of Seville the author might as well have been listing subatomic particles. The book became virtually unreadable.

Thank goodness it was short: 65 pages; October 2012