Enchanted Prose

Humanity in storytelling (North Carolina, Iowa, Florida; 1970s to present day): “Literature represents my greatest hope for our species at its very best,” Allan Gurganus said when asked about his ideal reading experience. Based on his new collection of stories on the stuff of life and what makes us humans, there’s reason to feel hopeful about the future.

Gurganus is a keen and empathetic observer of people. Hailing from the South, Rocky Mount, North Carolina, many of his stories are set in his invented town of Falls, and yet he speaks to and for all of America.

You may know the author from his award-winning debut novel that brought him instant acclaim, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells Us, in 1989. His last work, Local Souls, was published in 2013, so these uncollected stories were anxiously awaited by the literary community. Also for good reason.

While the voice of some of the narrators in the nine stories conveys an old-timey style of storytelling, there’s nothing old-fashioned about the contemporary issues Gurganus tackles exquisitely – subtly, cynically, wittily, compassionately, open-mindedly, poignantly.

While this is the first time these stories have appeared in one collection, most have appeared in another publication at some earlier time, as noted in the Acknowledgements.

The opening story, for instance, “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor,” first appeared in the New Yorker magazine in its May 4, 2020 issue. As you’ll see in all of the stories, the plot – in this case about collecting Americana – goes far deeper than that. It also sets a semi-autobiographical tone. Although it’s not set in North Carolina as others are, it takes place in eastern Iowa within striking distance of the University of Iowa where Gurganus taught creative writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. One of his students is one of my favorite writers and most everyone else’s, Ann Patchett, who wrote that Gurganus “was and is my most important teacher. He writes with a deep and joyful expansiveness that is completely his own. Every story comes with a novel’s worth of heft and insight.” Not to be overlooked is that both writers have a distinctly authentic way with words and remarkable compassion.

The narrator in the lead story is a graduate student scouting for art that’s “ethnographic” for a class assignment. On page one, we’re told he’s written his master’s thesis on Hand-Wrought Iowa-Illinois Farm Toys, 1880-1920, part of his “American Studies” program. What could be more American than folk art? When he stumbles into Theodosia’s Antiques, he’s met by an ornery, eccentric (“weighing under ninety pounds” wearing “a county’s worth of brooch timepieces”), and wise proprietor who has plenty to sell but isn’t welcoming. She’s had her share of thoughtless, condescending students who think her precious artifacts are “junk,” as they too have gone hunting for the same class. The unnamed narrator must prove his worth – it’s a dance. When he notices a framed portrait of the aforementioned good doctor on the floor he earns Theodosia’s graces, so she takes over the storytelling, spinning yarns. With wit and sarcasm, we gain a window into a small community’s culture appreciating their folk art that’s viewed by others as the lesser arts.

When the first story touches us in its unique storytelling and wisdom, we’re primed to love all the rest. And we do. You may be hard pressed to choose your favorite. The competition is tough.

The Mortician Confesses, story #2, was originally published in the literary magazine Granta. Narrated by a deputy sheriff, on the surface it’s ghastly: a shocking murder case like he’s never seen before. So flummoxed he repeatedly says: “Babies we all are, when it comes right down to it. We think we know decency, but we ain’t got the first idea of it, now, do we?” The crime itself is nasty, reflecting something much sadder and tragic about the rise in mental illness sweeping the country. This grim case involves the abuse of a woman with Down syndrome by someone mentally disturbed. It’s about human weakness, frailty, and loneliness, asking an existential question we struggle with: “What kind of God lets this stuff happen?”

He’s at the Office also tells a larger story echoing the heartbreak of six million Americans dealing with a parent’s Alzheimer’s disease. The grief a child feels when they watch their aging parent cognitively decline becoming a shell of who they once were. Told by the daughter of a loyal company man whose eighty-year-old dad has had to leave the job he structured his life around. Without the familiarity of his office surroundings and daily patterns, he’s more agitated and disoriented than he needs to be. An achingly beautiful tale of the lengths a family goes through to provide dignity, comfort, and peace for someone they love.

Less than twenty pages in, we realize we’re reading the story of America. Not just in the heartland and in small towns where everyone knows your business, but everywhere. About the impact of the loss of corporate loyalty to long-timers. How technology has dramatically changed lives. And what it means to reach retirement without the means for long-term care. Gurganus’ ability to wrap so much up in the telling is simply marvelous. This story, along with the final one, My Heart is a Snake Farm, also appeared in the New Yorker.

The wacky, tacky snake farm tourist attraction isn’t located in North Carolina but Florida. The snakes are actually alligators – too many to imagine – but it’s a vintage “roadside attraction.” So is the rambling motel across the road, acquired by a sixty-six-year-old librarian who moved to the state where a majority of American retirees move to if they go anywhere. The poignancy of her tale is how after six+ decades and even when her new home isn’t a dreamy situation, she feels appreciated for the first time in her life, making real friends through the kindness of strangers. Reflecting another phenomenon sweeping America: isolation and loneliness. It’s not the only story that will bring watery eyes, but it’s one of them.

The one that guarantees tears is perfectly titled Fetch, particularly if you’re one of 50 million American households who own a dog. The dog fetching is a “fat black” Lab. The narrator an observer whose voice tracks what happens when, “Something is thrown. We retrieve it, without quite knowing why.” The observer is our eyes, ears, and heart initially speculating on why the owners are walking along a rocky beach in Maine the day after a powerful “nor’easter” storm, and then making observations about how the couple is feeling watching their beloved dog who’s jumped into the wild and “frigid Atlantic as if bound for Ireland.” The observer captures the “panic” precisely the way we’d feel in the same situation.

If you’re counting, you know there’s four more stories: Unassisted Human Flight; Fool for Christmas; The Deluxe $19.95 Walking Tour of Historic Falls (NC) – Light Lunch Inclusive; and Fourteen Feet of Water in My House. They span miracles; truth in journalism; homesickness and homelessness; the golden era of shopping malls; racism, war, politics; and the “privilege of at least trying to rescue each other.”

What more could you ask of any collection? And one that’s under 240 pages?

Lorraine

An unusual, elegant approach to understanding performance anxiety (present-day and past reflections, Boston and Denver): In this thought-provoking, fascinating, and melancholy memoir, Natalie Hodges, a classical violinist, takes us into the intellectual and emotional experiences she went through to make a brave, life-changing decision to give up her professional dreams of becoming a solo violinist.

In Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, she twists the title with her uncommon memoir, elevating her personal stumbling block to higher ground in the form of scientific and scholarly inquiries in chapters that feel more essayist than memoiristic.

Common measure is a musical term for the most common time signature in which the rhythm of the music beats 1, 2, 3, 4. (See Hodges explain this in an interview.) The concept of common time, she writes, meshes with “communal time, in which the self can be in sync with others.” Part of that idea is that music is a universal language, so when we sit in an auditorium or concert hall we feel in sync with the audience sharing the music’s emotions.

This interpretation relates to the fundamental issue she struggles with: not feeling at one with others she performs with and unable to lose herself in the music along with the audience. Instead, she cannot breakthrough her “self-absorbed, interior time” – her self-consciousness and anxiety that she’ll “mess up” so “nothing flows.”

Although she’s performed on stages in the US, Paris, and Italy attaining technical mastery as a classical violinist, this wasn’t enough to be a solo artist. When you’ve spent practically your whole life practicing and loving the violin and the music, her emotions and professional judgments are profound. Between the beauty of her prose and the beauty of her passion for the music, we feel for her because she’s amazingly disciplined and committed.

Uncommonly too, her purpose comes across as not trying to pull our heartstrings, seeking our sympathy. Rather, as a Harvard trained musicologist she seeks a deeper understanding how the brain connects to music, time, and flow to advance her insight into what keeps happening to her. By writing it down, she’s making sense of her performance anxiety for herself, and then for us to apply to any endeavor, musical or not, which demands intense focus. In the process, she’s also experimenting with her dual interest: a literary life. With this memoir, she’s established herself as an independent and creative thinker with a writing future. 

I don’t pretend to understand the science and theories – neuroscience, theoretical physics, and quantum mechanics – nor, as a non-musician, the musicology. You don’t have to, and, interestingly, it contributes to why you’re drawn to the writing, marveling at the difficult path she took to try to “break out” of her self-fears and make an extremely difficult and honest decision after devoting twenty years to her artistry since she was a young girl practicing five, six hours a day, eight before a performance.

Hodges lets us into the mind of a perfectionist, intellectually and psychologically. We can’t help but be awed by her ability to play the most complex of musical compositions for the violin, to such a degree that she precisely knows when and where she’ll falter on stage. She’s her worst enemy. Her predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her acute self-awareness overwhelms her ability to rely on “muscle memory” to get into the flow. 

The concept of flow first came on the scene in 1990 when Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s a word you hear in educational circles describing gifted kids who can focus intensely for hours on end. 

Hodges doesn’t cite the “Father of Flow.” Instead, she digs deeper and more specific, introducing us to another psychologist and neuroscientist at Tufts University who’s influenced her thinking, Dr. Aniruddh D. Patel. He uses the cognitive concept of “entrainment” to explain being in sync with music. Defined as “the ability to synchronize the body’s movements with a beat” – not just that we “hear beats” but we “feel beats” – his research has turned “human entrainment into a theory of perception.” You can listen to a trailer to his 18-part lecture series, one of The Great Courses, here: Music and the Brain.

Hodges calls her second chapter “Untrainment” reflecting how she’s not been able to get lost in those beats. In chapter three, she introduces us to a classical pianist from Venezuela who’s so in sync with the music she can improvise complicated compositions spontaneously without missing a beat, Gabriela Montero. In awe of her “sixth sense,” Montero calls this phenomenon the “dual implications of helplessness and power.” Power signifying what’s written down in the music for eternity versus the impassioned musician performing with so much spontaneity.

Time, as the title indicates, is examined from many angles starting with the “Prelude,” another clever play on the common term Prologue. “Music itself embodies time, shaping our sense of its passage through patterns of rhythm and harmony, melody and form.”

It’s not until we reach Chapter four, page 79 (a slender memoir at under 200-pages, with another thirty interesting references), that the memoir and the prose becomes more self-focused, philosophical, and poetic as she looks back on her childhood filled with violin music her mother taught her how to play. 

“Uhmma” emigrated from Seoul, South Korea but PLEASE don’t think of the author as the victim of a harsh style of parenting Asian writer Amy Chua brought into modern language in her memoir Hymns to a Tiger Mother. Besides the dangers of labeling and contributing to rising anti-Asian sentiments, nothing could be further from the truth. Hodges loves her mother dearly and appreciates the gift she’s given her (all of her four children play a musical instrument). She reminds us that a characteristic of immigrant families who come to America is wanting “to give your children what you did not have yourself.”

Though she doesn’t dwell on her Texas father’s Asian stereotyping and awful abuse, having gone to South Korea to find himself a subservient wife to start a family in Denver, this is also a story about racism and abuse. How her mother sacrificed so much for her children, counterbalancing the darkness by making sure their home “was music, and music was color.” Music expanded and enriched Hodges’ world immeasurably. That’s not to imply she doesn’t briefly consider whether spending all those formative years practicing might have been wasted time. You can guess how she comes out on that question.

What also makes her memoir so unusual is that while her mother was being violently abused, in addition to the psychic abuse of racism, to the point that her father once hit Uhmma so hard her stitches from a Caesarean delivery “burst,” Hodges felt so much joy growing up in a house of music.

One reason, perhaps, Hodges’ journey doesn’t start off chronologically as commonly done. “Don’t write it like a sob story,” her mother advised. Through her uncommon approach, she hasn’t.

Lorraine

Remembering millions through two different Holocaust survival journeys (Poland, early 1930s to after the end of WWII; Maryland and Connecticut, late 1940s to late 1990s, & afterwards): The world needs saints and miracles.

Here’s how Mother Teresa explained the psychology of numbers – how monumental catastrophes in the millions don’t affect us like individual ones:

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Is that why we’re in a golden era of memoirs? If we share our personal Herculean hardships, the world might be more compassionate?

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Anna Salton Eisen in her first-hand account of her parents, especially her father’s, Holocaust stories in Pillar of Salt, and Rebecca Frankel’s second-hand telling of the story of the Rabinowitz family’s Holocaust survival in Into the Forest want us to never forget what happened to six million Jewish people humiliated, terrorized, tortured, and murdered in the darkest of times.

You’ll feel emotionally pained by both, and praise both since greater awareness can lead to increased activism and public outcry. Unknowingly, they also intensify the world’s shared pain aghast at the emptiness of the “Never Again” chant watching in horror the atrocities perpetrated on the Ukrainian people by another brutal dictator. Putin chillingly seems hell-bent on doing what Hitler did to millions – wiping Jewish people “from the face of the earth.”

As we remember the millions of lives lost that we cannot fathom but do so through the lives of two Jewish families, Eisen wants us to also remember another five million more wiped out: non-Jewish people, including ethnic groups like the Romani and Slavic peoples; religious groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses; essentially anyone they deemed “socially aberrant”; and enemies of the State.

Poland is the country where the greatest number of Jewish people were erased: three million. Poland is also the Holocaust setting of both books. In two small villages and two ghettos near each, and concentration camps spread out.

One, Zhetel, was “once a very happy little Jewish town” in northeastern Poland where Miriam, Morris, and their daughters Rochelah/Rochel (Ruth in America) and Tania (Toby) happily lived (surrounded by their large extended families) until they were driven out to live under intolerable conditions at the Zhetel ghetto. The other, the Salton family (Eisen’s father George, brother Manek, and their parents) lived in southwestern Poland in Tyczyn, the region known as Galicia (which extends into western Ukraine including Lviv), until they were forced into the Rzeszów ghetto.

Ghettoization was the first collective step towards dehumanizing the Jewish people. Many families crammed into the same tiny living spaces, never knowing when the Nazis would come and deport them to concentration camps: six extermination camps and over 1,000 labor camps. It’s from the ghettos that the Rabinowitz and Salton stories dramatically diverge.

The four Rabinowitzs run into the forest. George Salton’s parents are sent to the “death camps.” He also got separated from his brother, never seeing his family again. Being with your immediate family during horrific trauma and upheaval provides inner strength, but hiding out in a forest for several years and surviving is remarkable. Also stunning is that without any family George Salton endured TEN labor camps. (He hadn’t met Eisen’s mother Ruth until after the war; she was sent to Siberia.) Both family survival stories are mind-boggling.

The forest is the Białowieża Forest. “One of the earth’s last remaining primeval woodlands,” split between Poland and Belarus, today a UNESCO World Heritage site. They managed to survive in an “underground village” dug four feet into the ground called zemlyanki, a Russian word that means “dugout.” Morris Rabinowitz had been in the lumber business so he knew woods, so many people followed him there. Who, though, could prepare anyone for the massacres and living-on-the-edge with barely anything? Miriam was resourceful too, having owned a drugstore that carried a little of everything. Still, it’s a miracle their daughters sustained a “remarkable amount of childlike wonder in the brutal forest reality.”

As a whole, Holocaust survivors didn’t talk about what they went through. The Rabinowitzs also stand out because they “talked about it all the time,” whereas Salton Eisen lived in a silent home with “undercurrents of mourning” sensing her “gloomy heritage” but not being told. Until one day in her twenties, she cries out, “For G-d’s sake, Dad. What did they do to you?”

Which may help to explain why Eisen’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood come across as more psychologically devastating than daughters Ruth and Toby. By the time Eisen was about eight, she’d internalized the silence and pain she saw in her father’s eyes into nightmares, fears of “separation” and “abandonment,” and “isolation” as she didn’t know any family like hers. Although her father rose to a senior position at the Defense Department, and her homemaking mother was an extraordinary cook making sure her family was always well-fed and turning her skills into a catering business – fitting the sixties and suburban Maryland – when she discovers something of her father’s (no spoilers) in his nightstand she confirms his sinister wartime experiences. Instead of acting like a typical middle school kid, she delves into researching the Holocaust but tells no one. Her memoir tracks her awakening, deepening, and growing activism that continues today.

So much stuns in these memoirs, including discovering that Eisen is the founder of the synagogue in Texas (where she lives now) in the news a few months ago when an anti-Semitic terrorist held four members of the Congregation Beth Israel including the rabbi hostage.

We may want to look away from all of this, but how can we? Eisen points out these stories must be told “for the sake of history and the future of humanity.” Morally and existentially, she continues to say that “with freedom comes responsibility.” Her memoir may be spare on words (less than 200 pages), but she doesn’t spare the emotions. Frankel’s approach consumes more than twice as many pages (374, plus another seventy pages of detailed notes), describing relatively unknown history that also emotionally affects us.

Another difference between the two memoirs is that Frankel’s is a second-hand account told to her through daughters of Holocaust survivors who survived with them. How she connects with them is fascinating and miraculously coincidental, along with another amazing coincidence. Into the Forest, then, reads more story-like in the sense that there’s a Prologue, a before the war, a during the war, an after the war, and an Epilogue – the full arc of a novel in that respect. Frankel’s lyrical descriptions of the beauty of the forest are so discordant with what happened in the forest.

Eisen’s memoir of the during-the-war years would have been blank had her pleas to her father gone unanswered. He not only opens up but returns to Poland for the first time with his family. Her prose is more sorrowful in its rawness, less embellished although sometimes she expresses her profound emotions poetically. (Her Holocaust poems have been published.)

Into the Forest describes two relatively unknown underground resistance movements in the ghettos and after the war. Eisen makes reference to these but she concentrates on, “how it must feel to carry so much pain”? Today she’s a mental health therapist specializing in trauma. Her activism continues as her memoir is being adapted into a documentary planned for release this summer, In My Father’s Words. No doubt her father’s memoir, The 23^rd Psalm, will also feed into it.

Both memoirs exemplify Eisen’s dedication. How vital for history and humanity is “the importance of memory.”

Lorraine

When words aren’t enough to express acute grief (New Jersey, present-day; 1980s Touran, presumably Iran): Not all time travel plots ask us to interpret the protagonist’s dreams to more potently depict the emotional devastation of profound loss as The Almond in the Apricot exquisitely does.

Two universes – different countries, different time periods, one real the other imaginary – are used to portray the penetrating grip of the death of a best friend – roommate and soul mate – suddenly ripped away, dying instantly in a car crash. Emma and Spencer are domestic partners. If he wasn’t so intent on finding a male lover, they might as well have been married. He may have joked about that, but the sense we get is she would have regardless of their platonic relationship.

“Emmabelle, if I were going to the moon – Luna, help me – and I could take just one person, woman or man, it would be you.” … “Emmabelle, will you pretend to be my wife, for now and forever?”

The Almond in the Apricot is Emma’s story, mostly what happens to her when her soul mate is gone. As opposed to her relationship with Spencer’s friend Peter, her boyfriend. The threesome worked beautifully, no jealousies. Easy flow that enabled Spencer to come and go as he pleased balanced by times when Peter preferred to opt out of whatever they were planning to do – generally Spencer’s plans since he was drawn to the stimulation of New York City, particularly The Village, whereas Emma gravitates to order. Peter misses his friend too but still sees Emma as his girlfriend.

When the novel opens, her heart isn’t in it anymore but she hasn’t said anything to Peter. How their relationship ends isn’t at the heart of what consumes this story. What’s at stake is Emma’s sanity. How a twenty-nine-year-old deeply grieving Emma from suburban New Jersey (probably New Brunswick area near Rutgers University where she studied), a senior engineer who designs wastewater sewer systems (not a particularly sexy job or typically seen in novels), weathers the trauma.

“It actually doesn’t get easier as time goes by. It gets harder,” Emma says. After her initial “strange sensations and visions,” she began to have bad nightmares, finding herself in the bathroom sick, not knowing how she’d gotten there. “The fear and the uncertainty felt too great for me to grasp,” she admitted to her closest friend and colleague at work, Tina. An interesting storyline as Emma, and the reader, aren’t so sure she’s a friend versus taking advantage of her inability to function exceptionally at work (and socially) like she’d always done.

The intensity of Emma’s grief is too much for her to grasp. The nightmares continue and evolve into something else. More dreamy, familiar, and nostalgic. They’re not normal, because they don’t just recur the same way each night. They progress like you’re watching a “television series with every episode” evolving.

Sara Goudarzi chose to open her thought-provoking, speculative novel in Emma’s dreamscape. These chapters are titled Touran, but it’s not clear if the setting is real or fictional. Born in Tehran, Iran where there’s a region called the Touran Biosphere Reserve, presumably this is or was inspired by her homeland.

It’s Emma who tells us she thinks her dreams are from the past, the 1980s. Which fits the storyline of an eleven-year-old girl, Lily, and her parents hurrying to the basement in the middle of the night when sirens go off alerting them to take cover as they’re living near a war-zone with missiles being shot in the air in Iran, a country at war in 1980 (the first Gulf War) and then ten years later the Second Gulf War lasting another eight years (https://www.history.com/topics/middle-east/iran-iraq-war; https://www.britannica.com/list/persian-gulf-war-timeline; https://www.britannica.com/event/Iraq-War).

Reading the novel eight years after Ukraine fought Russia in Crimea isn’t lost on the reader; it feels far-seeing invoking how Emma tries to make sense of her unconscious nighttime experiences that are frightening, life-altering, and surreal and yet as they develop we also see that Lily’s childhood was happy. So, we think Lily is, in part, a reflection of Emma’s past and present when Lily becomes attached to a boy, echoing Emma’s can’t-live-without-Spencer kindred relationship. 

Emma’s story gets even stranger and more complex as her dream world starts bleeding into her real one. That’s when we realize how carefully thought out Goudarzi’s novel is. Even the title’s stuffing an almond in a dried apricot tips us off to we’re in for something out of the ordinary. A strong sense that each word is as precise as can be, and as poetic as possible. In fact, the author is an award-winning poet. She’s also someone who’s lived in three diverse universes, if you will: Iran, Kenya, and the US.

There’s something else Goudarzi brings to her novel: a nimbleness with theoretical physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity in which “space-time” provides a fourth-dimension to helping us make sense of the world. Could there be another universe out there we could cross over to that would be happier than this one? This epiphany of sorts happens when Emma turns on the TV and hears a theoretical physics professor from New York University expound on these dense concepts.

Professor Kerr Jacobs tells us that “The idea of time travel and parallel universes has mesmerized people for centuries.” He goes on to say, “Newer ideas about how the universe is built puts forward the possibility that there could be more dimensions than the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time.”

The thirty-something speaker with gorgeous green eyes mesmerizes Emma. Is it because she’s obsessed with understanding the meaning of her dreams? Or, because the professor has the same emerald green eyes as Spencer’s? Same head of dark curls? You can almost guess what happens next.

How long do you think it takes to grieve the death of someone who’s part of you? Are you thinking how dare we put a timeframe on the grief process? What if the sadness is so severe the bereaved person is unable to move on, because the hole is so big inside of you it cannot be closed? At one point do your feelings and behavior become abnormal?

In 2021, the mental health community decided to put a time limit on what’s considered normal and not. The bible of psychological diagnoses, known as the DSM or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, recently added Prolonged Grief Disorder to their fifth edition. 

It’s not surprising not everyone agrees with this decision, which sets a one-year timeframe on moving on IF the patient is diagnosed as meeting “some” of eight identified symptoms, such as “identity disruption (e.g., feeling as though part of oneself has died), difficulty with reintegration (e.g., problems engaging with friends, pursuing interests, planning for the future),” and “feeling that life is meaningless.”

Emma exhibits all the symptoms on the DSM list.

Consider also psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Will Emma move through the five stages? Reach the stage of acceptance? In one year’s time?

Putting aside the artificial timeframe, does she sound mentally ill when she asks: “Must there always be something? Why can’t it ever be easy?”

Lorraine

What happens when you dig into your father’s Argentinian past? (Buenos Aires 1998; backstory 1973 – 1976): On a Night of a Thousand Stars is a title that evokes beauty and peace. Yet starry skies also illuminate darkness. Passionate and terrifying, colorful and bleak, are the two contradictory themes wrapped up in this emotional moving, dual timeframe, historical novel.

Set primarily in and around Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, Andrea Yaryura Clark mixes politics with romance, a heady combination. In 1998, the country was governed by a President. From 1973 to 1983, the Republic was overthrown by a military dictatorship that sponsored terrorism against its own people. Brutal political conditions we may not be familiar with, intensified by passionate love embroiled in both timeframes.

Who better than Clark to tell this story? She lived in Buenos Aires during the ‘70s and the ‘90s. And she, like her feisty and compassionate protagonist Paloma Larrea, now live in Brooklyn, New York. Both also cherish their homeland and its diversely rich culture.

When Clark wrote the novel exposing the dark side of Argentina’s Dirty War, she had no idea how piercing it would feel in 2022 when nearly the whole world is aghast seeing what genocide looks like, standing united for peace, not war.

If Argentina is a country you don’t know much about, after reading this sensuous novel balanced by a clear-eyed view of rising up against the worst of humankind, you’ll come away better informed about its lively culture, landscapes, and 20^th century history. Clark’s objectives.

Buenos Aires is the second largest city in South America, with a multitude of varied neighborhoods that make up the metropolitan area. Recoleta, considered the domain of the wealthy, is where Paloma’s family owns an apartment. One of many.

Paloma is twenty-four when the novel opens in 1998. She’s about to embark on a trip from New York to Buenos Aires as her handsome, charismatic father Santiago will soon be sworn in as Argentina’s Ambassador to the UN. The 1970 chapters begin when he’s a law student at the University of Buenos Aires.

The Larrea family also owns a ranch, El Pinar, situated on century-old land two hours from Buenos Aires in the “Humid Pampas” region. Touting “some of the most fertile soil in the world,” one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world in the twentieth century. Like other grasslands today, the habitat is considered “endangered.” It’s here that Paloma developed fond memories of her grandparents. Still close to her grandfather (her grandmother has passed away), and to a gaucho (cowboy) who’s been attached to this ranch and the family for a long time. The ranch and the Pampas introduce us to another perspective on Argentina’s history and its world-class beef grown on plains covered by fertile pampas grass called cortadera. The country’s history, then, is also tied to its love of horses, which is tied to its world-class polo.

Santiago made it big on his own on Wall Street. The Larreas own a second apartment in Manhattan, and two beach houses, one in the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, the other in La Paz, northeast of Buenos Aires. The plot quickly takes off at a party in which Santiago, his brother, and their Argentinian polo teammates have flown in to the Southampton Polo Club to celebrate their country’s proud tradition as the “Mecca of Polo.” At the beach house, guests are treated to a “traditional asado, an Argentine barbeque,” with tango music playing, conjuring the steamy dancing we associate with the country, which also has a long history of folk music.

Nothing in the novel moves slowly. At the polo party, Paloma meets one of her father’s old university friends, Grace, who makes a curious comment to her triggering the plot: her search to find out about her father’s past when Paloma arrives in Buenos Aires. “I had always believed my family, like many of the Argentine elite, had not had their lives disrupted by the dictatorship,” clueing us in by page nineteen that this probably wasn’t true. Is that why he hasn’t spoken of his past? What does her mother Lily know? 

The secrets Paloma uncovers fit the expression Be Careful What You Wish for. Her research deepens quickly, magnified by how little time she’ll be in the country. Enough time, though, to kindle a delightful romantic relationship with Franco Bonetti. Their paths cross when she attends a meeting of an activist group called H. I. J. O. S – The Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence, and the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

The story swiftly moves into telling us about the children of H. I. J. O. S. who disappeared starting with the short-lived presidency of Isabel Perón, who essentially turned her government over to the right-wing Argentine Anticommunist Regime. To a disgraced era of arresting, interrogating, torturing, and killing some 30,000 people hidden in “detention centers,” and to ripping newborn babies away from their mothers in hospitals. Terrorism that coincided with Santiago’s university days that didn’t end until a new President took back the country, Raúl Alfonsín, “father of modern democracy in Argentina.”

While the writing took Clark seven years, On a Night of A Thousand Stars took longer. First she envisioned a political and social justice documentary, and a nonfiction book. Then a screenplay — deservedly because her fictional characters are ripe for the screen. The last came first: historical fiction.

Both timeframes are romantic. The past centers on a more feverish love story with a woman whose name personifies her mystique – Valentina – with growing tension between Santiago and his best friend, Máximo. There’s another man in Paloma’s life besides Franco, Juan, a polo player. Her parents know and approve of him. But there’s no heat in their relationship, no competition with alluring and tender Franco. All the love stories link to complicated political history. Clark has worked out the complexities so that we understand how the past is ever-present.

Cultural objectives give the novel so much richness and pleasure. Scenes in cafés that seem everywhere; others that take Paloma’s search with Franco to other parts of the country, such as central Córdoba with its beautiful Spanish colonial architecture and the stunning village of San Martin de los Andes in southwestern Patagonia.

Literature is as very much part of Argentina’s culture. Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986), whose body of work is enjoying a boom today, is mentioned. Fictionally, very much alive in 1998 is Martin Torres, a professor, activist, and memoirist so realistically depicted I kept googling his name and his memoir Death by Exile but couldn’t find any references that he exists, despite thinking I missed finding him.

Torres plays an important role. Through him the author has a vehicle for relaying tortured history as he explains to Paloma “the system for disappearing people,” and the National Commission on the Disappearance of People established by the new President to keep searching for the vanished. “One day, she was sure, they would live in a society where human misery would be eliminated.” Hopeful words in our hearts and prayers today. Let’s hope “unified people could never be defeated.”

Ultimately, peace is the novel’s overriding objective. Paloma will also have to make peace with what she discovers.

Lorraine