A whisper in your ear: Canadian author Itani’s debut novel, Deafening, is a true joy, a moving and observant story of love, sorrow, and survival during the days of World War I. It’s made up of three entwining stories: a girl named Grania (inspired by Itani’s grandmother) learning how to cope with profound deafness in a world designed for the hearing; how she falls in love with a hearing man named Jim; and Jim’s hellish experiences in the bloody cacophony of the European trenches. Deafening is clearly a labor of love-Itani spent six years researching deaf schools and the Great War, and even became fluent in sign language. She’s a perceptive, sensitive prose stylist who’s gone the extra mile and more to really live in her characters’ skin and breathe the air of their time. That care comes through on every page.
Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com
Year: 2003
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Frances Itani
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Ann-Marie MacDonald
As a playwright, Ann-Marie MacDonald is best known for the lighthearted Shakespeare parody Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), but her novels travel a considerably darker emotional terrain. In her Oprah-blessed debut Fall on Your Knees, she detailed the corrosive secrets and lies destroying a dysfunctional Nova Scotian family. Her followup, The Way the Crow Flies, uses its setting in the early sixties as a backdrop for two shattering losses of innocence: Canadian Air Force desk jockey Jack McCarthy, who’s about to be caught up in the machinations of the Cold War; and, perhaps more heartbreaking, his eight-year-old daughter Madeleine, whose idyllic world is shattered when a classmate is found strangled in a nearby meadow, and whose teacher hides an abusive side from the community. A portrait of a family who struggles to figure out how to do what’s right in the face of harsh and confusing reality, this is heavy stuff, but MacDonald has a talent for drawing characters that pull you into the story all the way to the end.
Bound to Be Read, 870 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 646-2665, www.boundtoberead.com -
David Guterson
Like his previous novels, Snow Falling on Cedars and East of the Mountains, David Guterson’s latest, Our Lady of the Forest, follows another band of confused, rain-chilled characters battling tragic pasts and uncertain futures. In the sodden forests of North Fork, Washington, a homeless and asthmatic teenage pothead named Ann Holmes claims to be visited by the Virgin Mary. Word spreads across the weary logging town and Ann quickly garners a cult of followers, bringing the believer, the cynic, the hopeful, and the wounded out of the woodwork; among them an eye-rolling, misanthropic fellow mushroom picker, and a trailer-dwelling priest with a nagging attraction to the reverent waif. While Guterson’s story has all the ingredients for a predictable, maudlin piece of religious mumbo-jumbo, he stays wry yet sympathetic to his characters as they explore the complexities of modern faith.
Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com -
Harry Mulisch, Siegfried
Often considered Holland’s best hope to win the Nobel Prize, Harry Mulisch has built a reputation chiefly on two powerhouse novels-his World War II epic The Assault, and his sky-spanningly surreal The Discovery of Heaven, an ambitious work in the Umberto Eco vein. Mulisch’s aim in his latest, Siegfried, is pretty ambitious as well-an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the enigmatic evil that drove Adolf Hitler, via a fictional what-if tale involving der FŸhrer’s secret bastard son. It’s only partially successful. Many pages are wasted on a witty but ultimately self-indulgent bookend section concerning a Mulisch-like novelist, but the big problem is one that Mulisch himself takes pains to point out: It would be nearly impossible to create a fictional story more horrible that what the Nazis did in real life. And the sorrows of young Siegfried, while tragic, just don’t measure up. That weakness of the novel in turn makes the final one-third of the book fall apart into nonsense.
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J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello
Already the only writer to win the Booker Prize twice, South African novelist Coetzee nabbed an even bigger honor in October in this year’s Nobel. He certainly didn’t net such accolades by avoiding controversial topics-consider 1999’s Disgrace, a complex story about animal rights, racism, and his homeland’s iniquitous history and uncertain future. He’s notoriously enigmatic, rarely grants interviews, and once gave a lecture at Princeton not as himself, but in character as a fictional novelist speaking at a fictional college. His new novel expands that last premise into a fully fleshed-out book, an odd duck that’s not exactly fiction and not exactly a collection of essays. Elizabeth Costello’s titular heroine is a renowned Australian writer whose career is resonantly similar to Coetzee’s own; just how much we’re meant to correlate the two is one of the book’s sources of mystery. Structured as a series of eight public lectures that obliquely function as Costello’s autobiography, it’s a work with next to no traditional plot, but much in the way of thought-provoking and even deliberately confrontational ideas. This is writing intended to draw blood. There is certainly some self-observation taking place when Coetzee, in the book’s opening chapter, wonders why the public adores Costello even though “she is by no means a comforting writer. She is even cruel.”
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Savories European Bistro
Formerly an upscale pop-in-and-order-crepes-at-the-counter-type eatery, Savories shook things up last spring and transformed into a classy yet cozy dining nook with a distinct European flair. And then there’s the food. It starts with the fresh-baked bread, then eases into a heaping antipasto plate, slides full-force into an applewood-smoked bacon and smoked Brie salad, and then falls decadently into the moistest, most mouthwatering slice of fresh-strawberry-infused chocolate cake ever created. Stop by on a Tuesday, when Savories offers a three-course dinner for a mere $18. Menus change every four to five weeks.
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Arcadia
Every fall for the last three, we Tom Stoppard fans have been blessed. Following up on the wonderful productions of The Invention of Love by the Guthrie in 2001 and Hapgood last year by the Jungle, Theatre in the Round will present us Arcadia this month. Arcadia deals with the typical Stoppard theme of taking a thorny intellectual problem, in this case chaos theory, and using it as a metaphor for a discussion of love, landscape architecture, and the inability to know the past or predict the future. Don’t be intimidated—no math beyond a vague recollection of algebra is required. And while you’re contemplating the unknowable, don’t forget to laugh, because Stoppard is also the wittiest playwright since Wilde.
Theatre in the Round, 245 Cedar Ave., (612) 333-3010, www.theatreintheround.org -
First Born
My great-aunt lived in three centuries. She remembered seeing her first automobile. “It was such a novelty. I never thought I’d actually get a ride in one,” she said. She lived through ten popes and twenty presidents.
Born in St. Paul, in 1894, Sister Esther was the oldest of eight girls. Her parents moved to Madelia, where she spent most of her childhood. At 107, she was the oldest of more than four thousand School Sisters of Notre Dame worldwide. She died in Mankato on September 22, 2002. Her youngest sisters, twins, are the only siblings still alive: Olivia Nelson of St. James and Otillia Erber of Austin, Minnesota.
Back in the sixties, when I was growing up, I remember my entire family going to the convent in Pipestone to visit my dad’s aunt. We must have been quite a sight: Mom, Dad, and five kids—seven of us dropping by to say hello. All the other nuns would come and see us, too. And Sister Esther always made sure that we got cookies and milk.
It had been years since I had the opportunity to visit Sister Esther. Last summer, I went to see her with my sister and brother. Five minutes after we checked in at the convent, Sister Esther came strolling in with her walker on wheels, which everyone called “the Cadillac.” Attached was a basket, where she kept her Bible and a few other items. Sister Esther still pedaled an exercise bicycle and enjoyed doing crafts. She kept busy reading, solving crossword puzzles, and writing letters.
We explained that we were Margaret’s grandchildren. Margaret was her sister, and my dad’s mother. I told her I’d been reading about her in national publications and more recently in the book Aging With Grace. Sister Esther was part of an ongoing project known as the Nun Study, started in 1986 and headed by Dr. David Snowdon, author of Aging With Grace. She’s one of 678 nuns donating their brains to a long-term study of Alzheimer’s disease, as scientists explore why some people get the disease and others don’t.
In his book, Dr. Snowdon mentions that when he started his research, Sister Esther was 92 and told him she was too busy to be in a study about old people. Someone asked her when she was going to retire and she said, “I retire every night.” My cousin exchanged letters with Sister Esther over the years. She said, “In one of her letters from Montana, she told me that she was going to retire and move back to the convent in Mankato so that she could take care of the old people. She was 98 at that time.”
In recent years, the family would gather to celebrate her three-figure birthdays. Just before the turn of the millennium, on December 29, 1999, Sister Esther celebrated her 105th. There was a large turnout of family and friends. The twins, then 89, were wearing matching outfits. “You two look so cute,” my sister Beth said to them. “Sister Esther gets upset if we don’t dress alike,” Olivia said.
On September 26, 2002, in the chapel on Good Counsel Hill in Mankato, the nuns sang like angels as they put Sister Esther to rest. Her twin sisters were there, perfectly matched with soft teal jackets and pants and white embroidered knit shirts.
Dr. Snowdon was there too. My sister chatted with him. “So what’s the key to a long life?” she asked. “Exercise, fruits and vegetables, and keeping active,” he said. In the next two or three years, he would be studying Sister Esther’s brain, and would probably publish the results in another book. It would include his findings from more than a dozen other nuns who became centenarians and have passed away in recent years. Olivia, now 91, has her own theories about longevity. She told me she kidded Sister Esther that she lived so long because “she didn’t have a man to worry about.”
Fortunately, Sister Esther didn’t suffer from Alzheimer’s. Still, her memory in the past couple of years wasn’t as good as it used to be. As we left the convent that afternoon last summer, she asked us again how we were related to her. “Margaret’s grandchildren,” we repeated. “You’ll have to come back another day,” she laughed, “and see if I remember who you are.”
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A Delicate Balance
Listen closely: That’s not the sound of cicadas or crickets. It’s local theater critics tittering about A Delicate Balance, the Jungle’s revival of the Edward Albee play. What they’re rubbing their legs about seems to be that they can’t handle the formal speechifying and the “two-dimensional” characters, and isn’t it just a cut-rate Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and worst of all, What Does It All Mean, Anyway? Well, we won’t spoil it for them–other than to say that sometimes God is in the details, and a play is in the dialogue. We guess reality TV has whetted their appetite for more naturalistic, realistic language. But look at it this way: A Delicate Balance didn’t win the Pulitzer for the acting company, the stage set, or even the director—though these are all up to snuff in this fine production of an American classic. (By the way, Albee’s in town next month, November 19-20, as part of the Pen Pals lecture series.)
Jungle, 2951 Lyndale Ave. S., (612) 822-7063, www.jungletheater.com -
Dard Hunter: Master of Graphic and Book Arts
DIY? As a graphic designer for New York’s Roycroft Colony, Dard Hunter invented the concept. Hunter’s participation in the Arts and Crafts movement (which embraced an ideal of human craftsmanship over the machine-made) yielded impressive results. Hunter dabbled in a variety of media, including stained glass and metal, but his true legacy lies in his accomplishments in papermaking and typographical design. This exhibit reveals a diligent American artist whose designs are cleverly handsome, making even the decapitated head of John the Baptist, a cover design for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, into an elegant work of art.
MMAA, 505 Landmark Center, St. Paul, (651) 292-4380, www.mmaa.org