Southern Memories – The enduring power of a passion for reading, writing, friendship, and a “sense of place”:  It’s wonderfully fitting that the first book I can’t wait to share that’s outside the historical/contemporary fiction genre Enchanted Prose mostly blogs about is a gorgeous Southern memoir by the “Bard of Tuscany” whose madly in love with prose.  You don’t even need Frances Mayes to say she “loves imagery, I will practice writing as though I were painting.”  Her writing is so sensory and poetic you’re likely to find yourself, as I did, re-reading sentences over twice, three times, to catch the nuances, the meaning, the beauty.

It’s also apt because Under Magnolia reads like fiction.  How else could the author recall “backward time” so vividly?  Part of the answer lies in her keeping diaries, letters, scrapbooks, reading logs, poems, autobiographical writings, and photographs (sprinkled throughout).  The rest comes from memories so intensely etched they endure.  They come from the “intense physicality” of her Southern roots (Fitzgerald, Georgia), a “landscape of riddles and tricks” that profoundly moved her and saved her from a terribly dysfunctional family.  That the author derived enormous pleasure in the beauty of her surroundings and from reading and writing in spite of her circumstances is inspirational.  She’s resilient and a lover of life: “If I ever get out of here, I will never select unhappiness.”  The author’s inspiration awaits you.

From the opening line, you’re hooked: “At a few times in my life, I’ve not been aware that I’ve just stepped onto a large X.  The X in this case is being magnetically, fortuitously, drawn back to the South while on a book tour stop at Square Books, in Oxford, Mississippi.  She only intended to “pause” not “leap” – the leap leaving San Francisco where her memories were “portable” to an historic home built in 1806 in a town of 6,000 artists and “dreamers,” Hillsborough, North Carolina.  Mayes still maintains her Tuscany home, which we all got to know in her first “Under” memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun.

The dreamy NC town is not the same South as Mayes’ southern Georgia childhood, a self-contained “world in a jar.”  This “greenest-green” jar niggles our senses.  Of smells: flowering magnolias where “the bloom smells South”; a “narcotizing fragrance … jasmine, ginger lilies, gardenia, and honeysuckle”; the “verdurous air” of palmetto, crape myrtle, pecan, and sycamore trees.  Of tastes: Sally Lunn bread, Lane Cake, chocolate icebox cake, peach pickles, so tantalizing that “maybe it’s the food of the South that makes the children long so for home.”  Of heat: “The sun could melt a bar of gold.” Of beaches: where the joy of “diving through sunlight in water” is so expansive it feels like a sixth sense.

Lest Mayes’ Georgia years sound idyllic, putting aside what you may think are ordinary family dramas, they are anything but.  She is the child of two alcoholic parents, who are “wild” and “chaotic” and always frightening to her.  Their arresting photographs remind me of Zelda and F. Scott, ironically also Fitzgerald.  They are so preoccupied with themselves the author is left immensely alone, despite two older sisters.  “For hours, for years, I hide, reading by flashlight … in my hideouts, I thrived.”  She covets normalcy.  She finds it in Willie Bell, their maid who raised her and gave her “a steady point of view.”  Willie Bell offers kindness and calmness and grace, which the author likens to the ancient Egyptian queen, Nefertiti.  On a vacation with Willie Bell on the Golden Isles of Georgia, Mayes becomes painfully aware of racism: separate beaches, “separate worlds.”  This South she yearns to flee.

Her parents would drive anyone away.  They are “jets over ocean,” speeding by so fast they never notice their nine-year old driving a car!  Reading is a prodigious escape: 6-7 books a week!  The author’s dubbing her parents “fabric people” is instructive.  Her father, Garbert, owned a cotton mill; the lovely fabrics he brought home magnify her mother’s devotion to the appearance of things.  Her beautiful mother’s tragic life mirrors the textures of fabrics she surrounds herself with – the dimity, seersucker, voile, chintz, toile, and silk.  Shear and delicate, fragile.  By high school, Mayes begins calling her mother by her name, Frankye, portending the slipping away of mothering.

Part of the fragility of her parents’ story is their dramatic downward trajectory due to long, awful, debilitating illnesses, whose affect to this day is that the author has a hard time dealing with illness.  Of her mother’s potential, Mayes sadly asks: “How do you hold onto a falling star?”

There is so much more to this penetrating memoir.  Quotes and notes and impressions and stories by famous Southern writers like Faulkner; colorful grandparents, miserly Daddy Jack and Mother Mayes; and university years spent at the all-girls Randolph-Macon College, where the “unimaginable” importance of friendships is learned, at the University of Virginia, and a paradisiacal senior year at the University of Florida, where Frances Mayes is finally set free.

When Mayes muses on an ideal love, we’re treated to the elegance of a true romanticist:

I want ardent notes, wildflower bouquets left wedged inside the doorknob, poetry books wrapped in tissue, first kisses, the lips at my ear, the soft words, the moment of being, dance cards with tassels, midnight walks through old neighborhoods, laughter reaching up to the moon in the palms.

Despite pain and losses, Under Magnolia is the author’s ardent love note to us.  Open it up carefully, like tissue paper.  And then gently walk with it, dance with it, dream with it.  Lorraine

When Opera was the Rage – Musical passions and an imagined love between an opera diva and Mozart (18^th century European opera houses in London, Naples, Venice, Milan, Vienna):  When an acclaimed flutist and novelist (Eugenia Zuckerman) touts a musical novel about a legendary opera soprano (Anna Storace) who inspired Mozart, written by a mezzo-soprano with an opera degree (Vivien Shotwell) who sang an aria Mozart composed for Storace, you can’t help but take notice.  When that novel, “composed” over a ten-year period, is warm and light like a piece of pleasing music – an accompaniment to the “warmth” and “light” Mozart is imagined telling Storace she brings when she graces a room – you’re doubly pleased.

You need not be an opera fan to hear this novel’s music.  The prose gracefully sweeps you along through the highs and lows of Storace’s narrative. You may, though, like me be unfamiliar with the language of the opera (messa di voce, motet, cadenza, ritornello, fioratura, recitative, libretto, roulades, ornaments, rondo, singspiel). That’s perfectly alright because the author’s style is intentionally accessible.  Shotwell does not want to overwhelm us.  She wants us – like all the passionate musical characters in this novel (drawn from real people except for Lidia, Storace’s loving maid, and other servants) – to consider that there may be “no higher art than music and no purer musical form than song.” Even the alluring dusk jacket (sorry e-readers!) embracing the trim 287 pages and short chapters feel designed to please.  All part of the artfulness.

The gem of inspiration for the fictionalized story comes from an aria that Mozart composed for Anna in 1787, a duet in which he plays solo piano.  An Italian translation includes: “Don’t fear, greatly beloved; for you, always, my heart will remain.”  The opera was Mozart’s farewell gift to Storace when she left Vienna to return home to London to be with her fiercely protective brother, Stephen, a violinist; the author offers up a more intriguing reason.  By now, Storace’s adulation is regal, leaving in a “four-horse carriage lined with furs and velvet.”  She’s 21, the same age Shotwell was when she began to write the novel.

It opens in London, 1776 and traces the meteoric rise of a child prodigy to prima donna over ten years.  Eleven-year-old Anna has a voice like a “pearl.”  She wants everyone to love her and they do.  Her first lesson is with the castrato, Venanzio Rauzzini, who “cherished her” instantly.  Without a family, she added meaning to his life, and so he devotes himself to her unconditionally like a loving father.  Two years later, Storace is performing at the Royal Opera House “where two thousand hearts lived with hers.”  Two more years, age 15, she’s ready to leave London for Naples because “all anyone wanted now were Italian divas.”  At 16, she heads to the Pergola Theatre in Venice performing comic opera with Ludovico Marchesi.  He does her an enormous favor overshadowing her for she is not to be undone, and on stage, naturally, on-the-spot, she outshines him because she’s also clever and witty.  Fired for overstepping her role but she’s now a sensation, she heads to La Scala in Milan, where she meets and befriends an Irish tenor, Michael Kelly.  In Milan and then Venice, they are performing “opera buffa,” popularized because it can be enjoyed by everyone as opposed to serious opera (opera seria.)  The opera company includes Mandini, Benucci, Saliera, and Francesco Bussani.  Storace and Bussani play lovers on stage, which gets Storace into deep emotional territory with him off-stage.  Fortunately, she can flee from him with the rest of the company to Vienna, because that’s where a music-loving emperor, Joseph II, who believes music is “the soul of humanity,” is forming his new opera company.

Just as Vienna is thought to have been the musical soul of Europe in the 18^th century, Vienna is the soul of this novel.  For here is where Anna meets 27-year-old Mozart.  He falls in love with her beautiful voice – “listening to her he remembered everything he aspired for in his music” – and she falls in love with Mozart’s music.  But were they lovers?  Was it only in their music that they found an “intimate meeting place for themselves alone”?  Or, were they more intimately involved?

As we reflect on these questions, the author presents evidence.  Mozart repeatedly needs to remind himself that he loves his wife, Constanze (and now he’s a father of a son, Karl), but the truth is he had fallen in love with her prettier, opera-singing sister, Aloysia Lange, jealous of Storace.  We’re also told that Mozart “learned early and well to disguise his feelings with revelry.”  And, it is during this time that Mozart composed The Marriage of Figaro for Storace, perhaps his most beloved opera.

Shotwell delights us with descriptions of Mozart’s brilliance, intensity, playfulness, discipline, creative risk-taking, and complicated compositions. “The walls might have collapsed in flames around them and he would have kept murmuring and analyzing.”

Together, Storace and Mozart win the hearts of everyone.  Because of Shotwell’s creativity, we can see why.

An Epilogue dated 1801 and an appreciated Historical Note fill in the missing pieces, satisfying us the way you feel when you’ve bought a ticket to a performance and are so glad that you showed up.  Lorraine

Progress vs. Preservation, Montana in the 1950s: You don’t have to love and know horses or appreciate their role in the history of America’s West to love this historical fiction debut.  But I bet Malcolm Brooks does.  For I don’t think it’s possible to craft prose so authentic otherwise.  The story – with its well-drawn characters and pitch-perfect dialogue illuminated in backstories that transport the reader to other settings and times – Roman London archaeology, Maryland horse country, and the US. Army horse cavalry in WWII – carries an intriguing, important, and timely message.  Together, the outcome is a novel worth raving about.  An awesome voice.

Two women from very different backgrounds and two cowboys the reader senses have pasts that badly crossed drive the foreboding story.  The two women: Catherine Lemay, an ambitious 23-year old pianist turned archaeologist “in love with the vanished past” and Miriam, a Crow Indian teenager she convinces to be her guide.  The two men: Jack Allen, a cocky, enigmatic, chilling-to-watch horse wrangler and John H, the opposite, a horse tamer and talented sketcher of horses, a younger man who has also lived in a saddle.

The story sounds straightforward but it is elusive and complicated, actually.  It centers around Catherine being hired for a summer by the Smithsonian to conduct a River Basin Survey prior to the building of a major hydroelectric dam to calm nerves that there’s no historical significance in a canyon south of Billings, Montana, the site of the project. Nothing is calm here, actually.

A private company, Harris Power and Light, and the Army Corps of Engineers are also involved in the project – the power company far more powerful than innocent yet daring Catherine suspects.  Early on, there are hints of danger.  Catherine may have cut her teeth on ancient Roman (and Greek) archaeology but she knows nothing about New World archaeology in America – not about horses or their cowpunchers, nor the beauty and badlands of Montana, nor the Crow tribe of the great northern plains, nor the Basque sheepherders who immigrated to Montana from Spain and their centuries-old language, Euskara.  Most of us don’t either – but we will because Brooks wants us to.  All unfold and are skillfully woven together to illustrate deeply felt struggles between the Old World and the New – between older Native Americans who believe the construction site is “sacred” versus modern Crow who need jobs and money, and a power company that means business.

Catherine’s parents and her recent fiancé, David, have general concerns for her safety.  Those who better understand what she’s getting herself into include Miriam, who fears getting caught in the middle of her people’s fight; Max Caldwell, an avuncular gas station attendant who seems like a minor character but becomes increasingly important; and John H, whom the reader expects Catherine is destined to know.

John H (the H likely stands for Horses) is the most memorable character of them all.  A horse whisperer who “even as a boy can walk into a pasture and catch a horse, even if no one else can catch a horse.” Six years prior, he rescued a dun mare as “though the mare were born to nothing else, as though neither could conceive of another way to exist.”  His marvelous voice teaches Catherine and us about horses and a “tract of land that belongs to God Almighty, a testament to the everlasting limits of man.”

The reader is in for quite a ride as the mystery takes off.  What, if anything, do Catherine (and Miriam) uncover?  It’s a ride taken into remote backcountry mostly on horseback.  The language of horses and geology gave my new dictionary a workout!  Expect to read about percherons and pommels and quirts and cutting-horses and piebalds and bucksins and Barbs; and of batholiths and gumbos and coulees and cirques and talus slopes and cap rocks.

Far more than the new vocabulary was a feeling of wonder at the author’s writing style.  Brooks’ reverence for nature and his unique descriptions of the environment are fantastic – expressions like “lip of the sky” and the “cluck and rattle of throats and wings” and the “quaking aspens and the “air whisper in the grass” and a canyon that “yawns like the mouth of the world.”  The novel is loaded with enchanted prose.

Beyond the emotional/controversial cultural preservation versus economic/technological issue of whether this particular Montana canyon is indeed sacred to Native Americans and, therefore, should be preserved, the author wants us to reflect on even bigger, hot-button environmental/existential questions.  Max Caldwell answers by saying that it is “greatness [that] gets built on destruction.”  When he wonders “what kind of sense any of it makes.  Who’s got it right and who’s got it wrong?” you will find yourself wondering the same.

I hope you take this moving ride!  Lorraine

The power of radio, literature, nature, and love to incite imagination, resilience, and survival during WWII (Saint-Malo, France, 1944; and 1934/ 1974/2014 Paris, Germany):  This extraordinary novel – “ten years in the writing” by an author who has garnered a number of literary awards – inspired me to buy a new dictionary!  (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition: over 2,000 pages, 4,000 visuals.)  It often reads like mini-dictionaries in the natural, mechanical, and technical sciences, evoking so many beautiful things like mollusks and gemstones that offer stark contrasts to the horrors of Hitler’s war.  They also serve to stir the mind and spirit of a freckled blind French girl, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, whose soul is the soul of this historical novel, which opens with the German occupation of the walled city of Saint-Malo on the Breton coast, two months after D-Day.

Doerr’s novel is also a stand-out for its unique structure.  Clocking in more than 500 pages for the advanced reader copy, no chapter is longer than four or five pages, many merely one or two.  The effect is fast, edgy pacing, strengthened by chapters that alternate back and forth between “The Girl” and “The Boy” (see below) and in time.  Doerr’s style is crisp and notable.  The payoff is spellbinding tension, an intensity you feel straightaway; it relentlessly grows as the reader awaits the convergence of the stories of “The Girl” and “The Boy,” so sure are we that they will.

When we meet “The Boy” he is close in age to Marie-Laure: seven-year-old Werner Pfennig, who lives at an orphanage with his prescient sister, Jutta, in Zollverein, Germany, near Essen, which is “steel country, anthracite country, a place full of holes.”  Their backbreaking mines took the life of their father; Werner is resolute not to repeat that dreadful life.  Instead, he endures grueling training in a misguided notion of duty to country.  That Werner – who appears fragile (hair as white as snow; a “faint presence;” “like being in the room with a feather.  But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness”) – becomes one of the Reich’s prized cadets at the National Political Institutes of Education #6 at Schulpforta is, like so much else in this novel, presented in bold contradictions.  Werner’s development and experiences allow the author to delve into why Germans did what they did.

Werner happens to be a genius with radios – receivers, variable capacitors, inductors, motors, wires, tuning coils, solenoids, attenuators, ohmmeters, wave turbulence, ion detectors, Morse beacon, code breaking – so he becomes valuable.  He tracks radio transmissions across Russia, Ukraine, Italy, and Austria, with his huge comrade  Volkheimer (his size emphasizes Werner’s actions).  They ultimately reach Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure LeBlanc is hiding out with her father, having escaped burning Paris, at her great uncle’s Etienne’s house.

Number 4 rue Vauborel stands as a sentinel overlooking the sea.  Since returning from WWI, Etienne has never left the house.  And yet, “he has found himself at the nexus of information” because of a large radio hidden on the 6^th floor that gives him “the whole world right at his fingertips.”  He forms an endearing relationship with his brave niece.  Saint-Malo’s beaches and anti-resistance movement provide a powerful setting that clashes with the ugliness of war.

As the novel flashes back to 1934, Marie-Laure is six years old living in Paris with her father, a locksmith at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle.  This is a cleverly invented profession: the mind of a locksmith who can keep straight 12,000 locks also builds intricate puzzles and a scale model of their neighborhood in Montmartre – “hundreds of houses and shops and hotels” – so his daughter can find her way out.  Later, he labors to build an even more complicated model for her: Saint-Malo with its 865 buildings.  His laboriousness and ingenuity are testaments to a profound love that “will outstrip the limits of his body.”

In Marie-Laure, the author asks us to think deeply about the nature of blindness.  Doerr shows us how great books and classical music and mental puzzles unlock her imagination, giving rise to a remarkable resiliency when faced with the terrors of war.  The author presumably loves literature, and gives that love to Maria whose mind we see enthralled as she reads to us from Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  In Captain Nemo, for instance, we are reminded of the “great machine of curiosity, free of nations and politics, cruising through the kaleidoscopic wonders of the sea” – prose and stories that let Marie-Laure see the light.  Of course, she reads these books in Braille: “the raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.”

There are other important characters with intersecting stories.  One is Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel, a former gemologist with a passion for diamonds.  He’s been put in charge of collecting treasures – “things he did not dream he would see in six lifetimes” – precious European and Russian objects.  The timeliness to the Monument’s Men feels eerie. The Sergeant’s obsession with diamonds forms the perfect storm because there’s a legendary, rare 133 carat, gray-blue diamond of the sea – Sea of Flames – that has gone missing from the natural history museum since the Germans occupied Paris.

The author must loves birds too, because they fly across the pages.  He imbues the character of Frederick, a cadet friend of Werner’s, with this passion. Frederick’s 434 exquisitely drawn Birds of America is “not so much full of birds as full of evanescence, of blue-winged, trumpeting mysteries.”  What happens to Frederick, whose crime was faking his vision to get into military school, is heartbreaking, beautifully told.

Like the novel’s provocative themes, the title is thought-provoking.  I think it refers to Imagination – especially the blind French girl’s and the orphaned German boy’s – imagination that brings to light that which they both cannot see, connecting them.  According to the author’s website, the title refers to “radio waves that we cannot see” and the hidden stories of WWII, particularly those of “ordinary children.”  I think these two interpretations are reasonably close, except to say that what happens to “The Girl” and to “The Boy” is anything but ordinary.

This is a novel that stays with you.  Lorraine

“I Always Loved You” left me wanting more of Robin Oliveira’s absorbing prose.  “My Name is Mary Sutter” is her only other novel, her debut. It garnered rave reviews and literary awards, but I overlooked it.  Perhaps you did too, because the Civil War time period is not my favorite setting for historical fiction; I even live in Virginia where many battles were fought.  It took this immersive reading experience to bring the Civil War alive for me.

The Making of a Civil War Heroine and Modern Medicine (Albany, New York; Washington, D.C.; Virginia and Maryland battlefields, 1842–1867):  There is no mystery how Mary Sutter, a gifted young midwife as competent as her mother, Amelia, nurses and doctors her way through the Civil War to become an unforgettable heroine: through sheer single-mindedness of purpose, boldness, courage, and endurance.  The mystery, for me, is how Oliveira emotionally connects us to a fictionalized character who awakens us to the real heroes and heroines of America’s Civil War.  She wants us to admire and remember them; she even tells us so in her Acknowledgements detailing her exhaustive research process.

Notwithstanding the author’s experience as a registered nurse and former literary magazine editor, I think the answer lies in her exacting prose.  You do not read this novel casually.  Instead, you are pulled into it, to grasp emotions and visualize scenes word by word, sentence by sentence.  The reader senses the novelist poring over every word, analyzing and re-analyzing until she’s satisfied she’s landed upon the best way to show us her characters’ mindset and feelings.  The skill is in seamlessly embedding her fictionalized characters into Civil War history and battlegrounds, peopled by the likes of President Lincoln, John Jay, and General McClellan.  The fictional Mary feels as real as Lincoln feels present, as if the two really met each other.

The many compelling storylines all connect to Mary’s fight to do the one thing she wants more than anything else in the world, become a surgeon – a fight against society’s negative views about women’s role in medicine.  She’s repeatedly rejected by Albany’s Medical College; Albany is where she lives in her parents’ beautiful home.  Her father Nathaniel made his fortune in railroading, but he died before the story begins, introducing grief as an overarching theme.

In the opening pages, we witness Mary’s medical excellence in an emergency.  She unexpectedly encounters a surgeon, Dr. James Blevens, who urges her to take over a complicated delivery.  The subplot enables Mary to seize the opportunity to offer herself as his apprentice.  But he too rejects her, and then spends the rest of the novel regretting his decision, trying to make amends.

In Albany, Mary falls in love with her recently orphaned neighbor, Thomas Fall, who instantly admires her seriousness but finds that sharing grief with Mary’s prettier, easier, more vulnerable twin sister, Jenny, is a more powerful attraction and marries her.  The blow sends Mary off to Washington, even more determined to pursue her quest, seeking to join Dorothea Dix’s fledgling nursing corps.

In Washington, Dorothea also rejects Mary, this time because she’s too young.  Mary is undeterred.  Scouring the city, she finally finds work as a charwoman and nurse in the wretched Union Hospital, where she encounters another surgeon, Dr. William Stipp.

As the war escalates, Mary visits President Lincoln to plea her case to tend to the wounded on the battlefields.  Lincoln grants her wish, for he has an “endless capacity for grief” and the ability “to look into the future [is] his greatest skill.”  That is how brave Mary ends up performing so many amputations that no one even knows where or how to dispose of all the limbs.

Was this what medicine was?  Barbarity?  By comparison, even at its worst, childbirth was artful.  Even when women bled or seized, there remained at least the elegance of hope.  The flickering promise of life.

Mary’s love for Thomas, Blevens, and Stipp plays out in different heartfelt ways, as she discovers each of them at different times on the battlefields.  “Why is it that voices break hearts?” Mary wonders when she comes upon Thomas wounded.  When she’s finally working alongside the two war-challenged doctors in the chaos of battle, they repeatedly fail to convince her to return to the comforts and safety of her family home, where she is also desperately needed.  Through both doctors, we vividly see Mary’s “gentleness combined with competence seduced beyond measure,” as each develops strong feelings for her that grow from deep admiration to love and a need so powerful at least one of them declares out loud that he cannot live without her – “Only Mary’s presence kept him from weeping.”  By now, Mary Sutter has evolved into “a purveyor of hope,” because no matter how hellish the working conditions, her indomitable and indefatigable spirit offers hopefulness.  For the reader, this means the novel is inspiring, not depressing.

The absorbing prose is a mixture of contemporary phrasing, period language, and medical terminology.  Some examples:

Contemporary:  An arc of sunlight struck the firm contours of his body, and for a moment Mary thought she could see right through his heart; dignity an elusive thing when professors and drunkards alike answered Lincoln’s call; a national chess board realigning; time was on its own meter; privacy, after tenderness, the second casualty of war.

Period:  privy trenches, picket duty, tintype

Medical: vulnus puncture, Dover’s powder, bilious fever, ichtyocolla plaster

To sum up Oliveira’s writing style, let me offer another example from the beginning of the novel, reflected on at the end: Mary Sutter does not simply sit under an oak tree in the northern landscape of Albany – she sank into it.  That’s how you feel as a reader: you sink into the historical landscape of this novel, precisely the author’s intention.

Enjoy Reading!  Lorraine