When three-year-old Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759 – 1824) goes suddenly and completely blind one night as she sleeps, there is no dearth of physicians willing to treat her. Empress Maria Theresia of Austria immediately provides all the resources of the court – and of her court physicians. French author/journalist Michele Halberstadt creates a fascinating study of the young pianist, whose blindness has been diagnosed by court physicians as amaurosis, a form of blindness “that appears suddenly without any malfunctioning of the optical system. Its onset is either toxic, congenital, or nervous.” Certainly there is a chance that this wis a kind of hysterical blindness, caused by some trauma, perhaps within her family, but Sigmund Freud and his theories, are still a hundred years in the future, and there appears to be no way, at that time, to discover what it is that is blocking her sight. When Maria Theresia is eighteen, Franz Anton Mesmer, meets her father, and a “cure” begins.
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The structure of a folk song, as author Monika Fagerholm describes it here, explains the overall structure of this novel, with many repetitions through time and space, through past and present, and through new generations and old. Points of view constantly change among the many characters as the chronology moves between 1969 and 2012 and back. Bits of information are provided about one character in one section at one moment in time, contradicted in another section, and denied completely in yet another. Different characters go to the same places at different times and perform the same actions, but the results may be described differently, and may actually be different, depending on who is telling the story. If this sounds complex, it is. Finnish author Monika Fagerholm challenges the very nature of story telling in this novel, which has, at its heart, a series of dark mysteries which echo through more than one generation.
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Claudia Hampton, an iconoclastic, sometimes imperious, often maddening, and completely liberated seventy-six-year-old woman, lies in a nursing home awaiting death—very reluctantly. Having earned her living as a reporter during the Cairo campaign in World War II and later as a popular historian, she sees no reason why she should not continue her work as she awaits death. ‘Let me contemplate myself within my [own] context,” she says, “everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents.” As she fades in and out of consciousness (her nurse wondering aloud to the doctor, “Was she someone?”), she plans her story for her usual readers, indicating that she will omit the narrative but “flesh it out; give it life and color, add the screams and the rhetoric…The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out…There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water..there is no sequence, everything happens at once.” By turns humorous, thoughtful, satiric, wonderfully philosophical, and consummately literary in its observations and allusions, this novel is an absolute treasure, one that will appeal to every lover of serious themes presented in new ways.
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A novel which has received rave advance reviews for Amy Waldman, a New York Times reporter and bureau chief turned novelist, The Submission posits a series of “what ifs” and then lets the turmoil unfold. In the aftermath of 9/11, with hundreds of families trying to cope with the magnitude of their loss and the entire country trying to cope with their loss of innocence, a competition is held to design the memorial which will be constructed at Ground Zero. Representatives to the selection committee are chosen from all levels of society, including a woman who has lost her husband in the attack, and their task is to choose the best design from all of the “blind” submissions, designs lacking all personal references, including the name of the architect to avoid favoritism. In the final tumultuous voting between two completely different designs, Claire Burwell, the woman widowed by the attack, favors the design of a garden, a place of peach and contemplation, with the names of the victims on the walls around the garden. Other committee members are swayed by Ariana, a famed sculptor, who favors a stark, monumental creation called “The Void,” which Claire finds cold. When the envelope naming the architect is opened, they discover that they have chosen Mohammad Khan, an American, to design their memorial.
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