Twenty-something Julian Kunstler — somewhat ineffective in his attempt at adulting — is sent to care for his ninety-something grandmother Mamie and her elderly dogsbody of unknown origin, Agatha, during Covid. Venice, California is a lovely place to wait out a pandemic — almost too lovely as Julian feels guilt at his own safety while others dwell in fear and panic. They pass the time with Mamie’s stories — of her own times of isolation, fear, and survivor guilt as an 11-year old Jewish emigre from Vienna who lucked into safety through the intense efforts of Hollywood’s artistic community to extract as many Jews as possible from Germany in 1939.
This was truly a wonderful book — full of stories suffused with reality and a painstakingly reconstructed sense of time and place. We hear the stories as well as the inner thoughts / reactions of both of them, giving an evolving insight into two distinct characters with wildly different contexts taking in the same information. Spectacularly presented.
With these stories, Schine manages to evoke not just the physical space of Venice Beach / Hollywood in the 40s, but the mental and cultural space as well. Music, language, philosophy, meaning, existence, and the nature of memory pervade conversations and thoughts. Music in particular suffused everything — Mamie came from the most cultured of Viennese Jews, her father a composer and mother a writer. She supported herself as a violinist, and I loved the way she took up violin as a youngster because she found the piano an oppressive instrument — as it missed all the notes in between while the violin could get them all. Many Hollywood stars of that era (mostly emigres like Mamie) feature in the stories: Greta Garbo, Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and others. Her discussions with Schoenberg are priceless — they discuss the “emancipation of the dissonance.” (I can’t stand dissonance in my music but I sure enjoyed reading about the Schoenberg’s thoughts on the subject!). There are parallels between Mamie and Julian — the guilt of being safe while their friends and family are decidedly not, the isolation, the feeling that the world they know is collapsing — and Mamie wants to help Julian make spiritual and ethical progress in his life. To understand the need for joy and to be able to live fully.
Listening to the audio book while walking I had to stop every five minutes to write something down — I was so afraid of losing it (unfortunately, I have a crap memory). I felt like every page had a life lesson available to anyone who wanted to catch it. I would have had a lot of quotes, but could not capture them in time with the audio format. I did manage to remember one: “ Ones trauma becomes banal when it is trotted out too many times.”
Hard to believe I hadn’t heard of Catherine Schine before this. I read so much that I am literally shocked to find such an excellent writer with plenty of previous work that I don’t know. I listened to this on audio and loved it. The reader did an excellent job of portraying the voices — I sometimes found the “elderly” voice she used for Mamie to be a bit difficult to hear but I adapted.
Books to look forward to ... 