Hortense CalisherRecensioni

Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Interesting book. Family's matriach (Zipporah Zangwill, that's name for you!) recounts the life of herself and beloved first husband, and then moves forward. Family gathers together each week, across generations."

This is a really interesting work of literary science fiction from the early 1980s. I missed it at the time, and I'm sorry I did.

The basic premise of this novel is that, at a not clearly stated time possibly in the early 21st century, the US is sending a crew of civilians to a habitat/colony at the L5 LaGrange point between the Earth and the Sun. It's the first time civilians have been sent to a space station as potential colonists, and due to a years-long campaign by wealthy guerrilla journalist (today he'd be a blogger) Tom Gilpin, it is at least in theory a first exercise in including the whole range of humanity, rather than just a super-fit, elite subset.

We meet the inhabitants of one cabin, a relatively elite group although not your obvious choices for First Space Colonists. They include Tom Gilpin himself, his old friend and collaborator Veronica Oliphant, industrial magnate John Mulenberg, former diplomat and current leading international businessman William Wert, Wert's Iranian wife Soraya, and the man with two names, Wulf Lievering/Jacques Cohen. Lievering/Cohen is not deceiving anyone; he's been living and working openly under both names, and each of the passengers assigned to the same cabin have been given complete access to each other's biographies. Lievering/Cohen has been a poet, a professor of literature, a translator, and other things along the way.

And then there's one of the few crew members who spends significant time with them, Fred Kim, son of an internationally famous architect who's done significant work for NASA. Except he's not Fred Kim; he's really Mole Perdue, son of the NASA admiral in charge of this project.

Mole smuggled himself aboard because he's deeply suspicious and concerned about the fact that his father told his friend Fred's father to keep Fred grounded until the second trip.

Calisher, whose writing career stretched from 1951 to 2009, practiced a complex, ornate style of story telling that wasn't in favor in the seventies and eighties, but may be more welcome today. We get the complex interleaving of the characters' stories, non-linear, detailed, and intricate. The story builds up layer by layer, as we learn the good, the bad, and the ugly of all the principal characters. No one is a mere spear-carrier.

A really, really interesting read.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

What a difficult book. I feel like there is knowledge and insight to be gained in these pages --somewhere-- but it's simply not given up easily enough. I mean, I like obscure memoirs, but this one isn't worth the effort to finish.

The book recalls memories associated with cousin Katie. But in the parts that I read we get more of the conflict that can exist when you are a Southern Jew in the North. In an extended family of blonds and brunettes, light and swarthy complexions, there's the opportunity for lots of conflict. Southern-ness versus Northern-ness versus different flavors of Jewish-ness.

This should have been more interesting read than it was.

And part of the problem was the language.

My image of our house was that it reverberated
with sounds that had to be classified, and that this
was society.

There is meaning here, just not enough to make it worth transliterating this verbiage into something worth thinking about.

But Physics was more like our own household,
full of closets that scarcely knew any longer what
they held, in whose depths I could spend an after-
noon with the concrete.

What it could have been is pages filled with the tantalizing hints of life, but Hortense passes by these too quickly. Like the cousins who were trying to pass themselves off as Christian. Or the puzzle she found in the big leatherbound family Bible.

... a receipt, issued to my grandfather for insurance
on a slave, that made me queasy, since according to my
father our grandmother had never kept any servants
except the freed. Perhaps my grandfather, of whom I
knew only the severe space between nose and mouth in
his mutton-chopped portrait, had been of another mind.

And there are just these quick snippets before we jolt ahead to another unrelated paragraph.
.
I so wanted to be fair in evaluating and considering this short memoir, however things like "another cheeseparing burden of the verbal" kept me from finishing. Sigh.

The subject - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters - seems simple enough. But under Calisher's hands it becomes more complex, a beautiful tapestry. In an ornate, near voluptuous style reminiscent of Henry James, she spins a story of newlyweds David and Elizabeth. Both are artists, at least in spirit, and represent the artistic life in New York City in the late fifties, early sixties. The story covers only about four years, but in that time these two come up against the realities of daily living and the responsibilities of adulthood, and parenthood too, after their daughter May is born. They have found what they think is the perfect abode in a loft in an old converted piano factory and they design and remodel the space to suit their needs and temperaments. But this "blue heaven" space turns out to harbor a deadly threat to their baby, A nearly invisible dust rising up from the stoneworks on the lower level exacerbates little May's hidden asthma, causing periodic seizures and life-threatening attacks. A subtext, or parallel story, concerns that of their parents, both widowed, who marry each other. David's father, Nicholas, has a heart condition and has lived a careful, almost precarious life for a dozen years or so. When he marries Elizabeth's mother, Margot, he marvels at this new lease on life, telling his son that the "surprises just keep on coming." The interplay between the generations is key to this story, and Calisher skilfully interweaves their lives, although they live on opposite coasts - the older couple in California. It is only after his father's death that David begins to see how closely they have been, and still are, all connected.

"He saw. If one could imagine a loom, or looms innumerable, warp-and-woof radiating everywhere, perhaps not even from a center. The texture was so tight that one could never see, even over as much as four years of it, where any one part had begun."

This book was first published in 1963 and has been long out of print but it has a kind of timeless widsom and beauty that makes it classic. I'm glad I finally found it and read it.

I am writing a short review of the second novella in this book, The Last Trolley Ride, as Hortense Calisher is able to capture in a wonderful way, a by-gone era that I never xperienced but in some ways I wished I had. This is an evocation of a last trolley ride someplace in New York State. I thought when I started that she was describing the late 1940's or early 1950's where some rural trolleys still existed in the U.S., but not in New York. It didn't feel like Oklahoma (Sand Springs) or rural Iowa. So, it became obvious this is a ride from the 1920's the late heyday of rual trolleys. All you know is that is is quite a ways north of new York City, and that it is east of Buffalo, and obliges the small city (or maybe large town) life. But you feel like you are riding right with her characters. These are not complex people that we expect in modern novels, but ones that resemble our grandparents.

Ick ick ick. This had a promising premise--an exploration of whether the author's southern Jewish family had owned slaves before the Civil War--right up my alley. There was about a chapter and a half of interesting southern background and then the rest was a memoir of the author's marriages and divorces and miscellaneous New York stuff. I forced myself to finish it in case there was some sort of revelation at the end, but NO SUCH LUCK.
August 2006½

Fiction, An intimate novel of a young husband, David, and his wife, Liz, their adjustment to each other, to the workaday world and after the arrival of their first child, First published by Little Brown & Company, Boston, 1963, 249 pp., First UK edition, London, Secker & Warburg, 1963, First Italian edition, Mondadori, 1966, "Trama di vita", translated by Ettore Capriolo, 276 pp.½