This is an intense and shattering novel about creativity and pain. The narrator, Mia Voss, is a woman in her thirties, a brilliant musical composer, born in China, but adopted as an infant, and subsequently raised, by white American parents. The book is about her creative struggles, and especially about her relationships with the two most important people in her life: her teacher, the composer Ryder Wakefield, and Ryder’s adopted son Oliver, a brilliant pianist (who like her, is Asian by birth, but raised in the United States). It’s a story in which everybody suffers from hidden trauma. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wakefield becomes one of the world’s most successful composers, as famous and respected as, say, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are in the real world. His music, we are told, combines minimalism and neoromanticism: a style that was generally prominent in the later 20th century; but his music also has an edge that keeps critics and general listeners off balance, so that the celebration of his genius always coexists with a certain unease. Wakefield has no doubts about his artistic production, but he is never quite able to deal with, or even acknowledge, his status as a gay man from a working-class Jewish background. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oliver is a virtuoso pianist, but not a composer, which means that he never gets full approval from his father. Mia and Oliver meet as children; they have an on-and-off relationship as young adults. Oliver kills himself at the age of 34, for reasons that are never entirely clear to Mia, nor to Ryder. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mia takes lessons from Ryder, starting in childhood, and becomes a famous composer in her own right. The present time of the novel comes after Ryder’s death. Mia goes to Rydar’s house in the desert near Santa Fe; she has been charged with finishing Ryder’s last orchestral work, called Death Fugue<\/em>, and left incomplete at his death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The novel consists in Mia’s first-person narration; it is non-linear, as it continually moves back and forth between Mia’s actions in the present and her memories of a life that has been entirely entangled with those of Ryder and of Oliver. Mia’s unhappy consciousness (to use a Hegelian phrase) is so intense and extreme that it is not really a spoiler to say flat out that the novel recounts her descent into abject misery and culminates in her suicide. She is split between trying to conform so that other people will accept her, and trying to be an original and authentic self, which proves impossible. Her own (adoptive) mother tells her again and again that she is “difficult to love”. Even her suicide is not quite an originary action, since it is an imitation of Oliver’s. (Suicide is always ambivalent, Blanchot says, because it is an effacement of self that can only be attained by the utmost exertion of self-will: you can only abolish yourself by asserting yourself). <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is always a split between Mia’s existence as an embodied human being and her devotion to Music, which seems like an unreachable ideal even though it only exists in particular instances of particular works that are composed by Ryder, Mia, and other merely mortal human beings. Mia suffers both from her unavoidable finitude, and from her lifelong attempt to live and make her way in a white patriarchal society that continually denigrates her for being nonwhite, female, and bisexual. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mia lives only for Music, but Music seems like a ruthless tyrant for which her body only gets in the way. The most disturbing passages in the book recount violent acts of self-mutilation (I will skip the details here). The narration is of these acts is quite harrowing, since the physicality of the self-harm is recounted in lurid detail, while the motivation is left obscure. Mia cannot give us (or herself) a rationale for her acts, because there is none. She can only respond to incidents in the world beyond herself — things that she does not will and cannot control — by turning everything back on herself, or on her body. She regards her own body as something alien to her, and as the source of her pain, a pain that can only be mastered by deliberate acts of still harsher, self-inflicted pain. Mia literalizes, in her own intimate experience, the romantic idea (or clich\u00e9?) that the price of beauty is suffering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mia returns, again and again, to a painting that has a place of honor in Ryder’s house, a depiction of the myth of Apollo and Marsyas (there are several famous Renaissance paintings on this theme, by Titian, Ribera, and Veronese, among others). Marsyas was a satyr who challenged the god Apollo to a music contest: of course Apollo was judged the winner (since he was a god), and as punishment for Marsyas’ presumption, Apollo flayed him alive. Mia obsesses over the painting and over the myth it renders. Though she is a student and disciple of Ryder Wakefield, she cannot imagine herself equaling him in artistic accomplishment, so she identifies with Marsyas. At one point, thinking of her relation to Ryder, she writes: \u201cwhat passes between teacher and student is not love; it is something entirely different. Admiration and terror, envy and hatred.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t know how to end my discussion of this novel, but perhaps that is appropriate given the novel’s own anguish, its suggestions of interminability even as it all too inevitably ends with the narrator’s own self-destruction. Maybe the best way to conclude is by citing the lyrics of a song by Poly Styrene (X-Ray Spex):<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you look in the mirror This is an intense and shattering novel about creativity and pain. The narrator, Mia Voss, is a woman in her thirties, a brilliant musical composer, born in China, but adopted as an infant, and subsequently raised, by white American parents. The book is about her creative struggles, and especially about her relationships with the two … Continue reading “Kailee Pedersen, THE MINIMALIST”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2038,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2037\/revisions\/2038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Do you smash it quick
Do you take the glass
And slash your wrists
Did you do it for fame
Did you do it in a fit
Did you do it before
You read about it?
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"