After much rigorous and vigorous deliberation, the Feuilletonist has selected the best films of the decade.

Allow me to preface the list by stressing that this is a subjective list drawn up by someone who (1) has a pronounced penchant for the operatic, incandescent and stylized, and (2) has certainly not seen every film of the past ten years. Having said that, the films ranked below are ones that have stayed with me, challenged me.

They are all films that I haven’t been able to shake. They also seem to me bound to provoke discussion for years to come.

I’d appreciate comments from readers on what you think I got right, overvalued or overlooked!

1. Talk To Her (2002) -

Almodovar began the new millennium with a masterpiece that catered perfectly to all his strengths. This film is remarkable for the rigorous choreography of its mis-en-scene, its high emotionalism and an authorial refusal to pass judgment. In subsequent works, Almodovar has lost the same equilibrium between perversity, melodrama, and his stylish mastery of music and décor.

2. Mulholland Drive (2000) -

David Lynch’s nightmarish puzzle of a film owes a debt to Bergman, whose Persona treads similar territory (transference of identity). This luminous and hallucinogenic film introduced a talented new actress, Naomi Watts, as a naive young actress (or is she?) seduced by celebrity and fame. Lost Highway (Lynch’s previous feature) might outdo it in terms of Robbe-Grillet style narrative ambiguity and psychological deterioration, but Mulholland’s pretense of normalcy is ultimately more disturbing and seductive.

3. Kings and Queen (2004) -

A penetrating study of a proud and unbending woman and the various men in her life, Arnaud Desplechin’s ensemble piece features extraordinary performances by Emanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve. It is a chamber work at once intimate and epic, one that deftly balances melodrama and farce.

4. Science of Sleep (2007) -

The first (and possibly last) film both written and directed by Michel Gondry was widely misunderstood by audiences and critics at the time of it’s release. (Based on the trailer, who can blame them for expecting a wacky romantic comedy fantasy.) Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg make one of the most memorable odd couples in recent memory. Gondry blurs the line between dream and reality until it all but disappears completely. Inventive, frequently hilarious and incredibly sad, Science is one of the greatest films about the psychosis-inducing solipsism of love since Brazil.

5. Synecdoche, New York (2008) -

The first (and possibly last) film both written and directed by Charlie Kaufman and propelled by a devastating performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman is an opera set in a hall of mirrors: a hulking and ambitious ode to failure, disintegration and folly. It also confirms Kaufman as the greatest fabulist-diagnostician since Fellini.

6. La Captive (2000) -

Every perfectly-composed shot in Chantal Akerman’s melancholic and Kubrickian adaptation of Volume 5 of “Remembrance of Things Past ” exudes repressed suffering and frustrated desire. It is also the most successful film adaptation of Proust so far, which is all the more remarkable given the sparsity of dialogue.

7. Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) -

Bela Tarr’s film feels both ancient and timeless. A traveling circus arrives to an isolated town in Hungary with a dead whale. A mysterious figure known simply as “the prince” incites the townsfolk to violence. The point of view is that of a poetic simpleton who is fascinated with the orbiting of the heavenly bodies. As the film develops at its own unhurried pace, violence of an apocalyptic order erupts on the screen: here are many scenes of extraordinary power, widely captured in luminous black and white and coupled with Tarr’s delicate application of light and music.

8. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2008) -

After two worthy yet uneven arthouse hits, Julian Schnabel astounded audiences and critics with a French-language melodrama that reinvented subjective film making by inviting us to see the world through Bauby and Schnabel’s eyes. Did I mention that it’s also accessible and utterly sincere?

9. There Will Be Blood (2008) -

A sumptuously old fashioned Western that ranks alongside the finest screen epics about America. P.T. Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis aren’t afraid to take their time (the first half hour is without dialogue) or to take risks (the unforgettable finale teeters on the brink of the ludicrous). Not merely just a throwback to an earlier era of film making greats, Blood is also a God-and-oil-soaked allegory for Bush’s America.

10. The Piano Teacher (2001) -

A film that is like a razor blade making an incision into your genitals. Who wouldn’t want to experience that? In Michael Haneke’s intense, and unrelenting adaptation of Elfriede’s Jelinek’s novel, Isabelle Huppert gives an unforgettable performance as a woman who is numb to all pleasure and pain (Benoit Magimel isn’t bad either as her prey / tormentor). One of the most penetrating and harrowing explorations of sexual obsession and guilt since Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter.

Ten Runners Up (In Order):

Being John Malkovich (2000), No Country for Old Men (2008), In the Mood for Love (2000), Bad Education (2005), I Served the King of England (2006), I’m Not There (2007), Head On (2004), The Triplets of Belleville (2001), Grizzly Man (2005), Spider (2002).

Fifteen More (No Particular Order):

Downfall (2005), Amores Perros (2000), Memento (2000), The Weeping Meadow (2004), Requiem for a Dream (2000), Fat Girl (2001), You, the Living (2007), Late Marriage (2000), Kippur (2000), The Man Who Wasn’t There (2003), La Vie en Rose (2008), The New World (2005), Gosford Park (2001), Reconstruction (2003), Children of Men (2006).

Honorable Mentions:

Steven Spielberg (A.I. Minority Report, Catch Me if You Can, Munich): After his high minded films of the 1990s (cf. Schindler’s List, Armistad, Saving Private Ryan) Spielberg finally found a unique (and consistent) visual style its these four filmic collaborations with the great Janusz Kaminski that span a variety of genres.

Guy Maddin (Saddest Music in the World, My Winnipeg, Coward Bends the Knee, Brand Upon the Brain) - The dreamlike, weirder-than-thou-art Canadian auteur strengthened his status as cult filmmaker du jour with his leap into feature length filmmaking.

David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Zodiac) = Fincher is fulfilling the promise of his 90s work - Seven, Fight Club, The Game - as one of the most visionary and meticulous filmmakers working today. In a single year, he released two of 2008’s best films. Zodiac was a tightly constructed neo-noir that defied many of the genre’s old rules; even without taking into account its revolutionary FX wizardry, Benjamin Button is a melancholy rumination of the passage of time, a work of art that is far subtler and more beautiful than it was given credit for.

Park Chanwook (Oldboy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) - Park is one of the shining lights (maybe torch is a better image?) in South Korea’s film renaissance. The last two installments in his revenge trilogy (The first, Mr. Vengeance is not in the same league)are high-octane, lurid violent ballets that make Kill Bill look like 3 Ninjas.

From the Globespotters Blog @ NYTIMES.COM

BERLIN

Inside a former club in Berlin, “Così fan Tutte,” Mozart’s tale of complicated love and the fickleness of women, has gotten a TV-style treatment in the hands of the director Christoph Hagel. Warning: subtitled “Sex, Lies & TV,” this updating is not recommended for Mozart purists….

READ THE REST AT NYTIMES.COM

Published today in the Wall Street Journal and at wsj.com:

Berlin

A.J. Goldman

Last week saw the jubilation of the Festival of Freedom, this city’s official 20th-anniversary celebration of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which divided East from West for 28 years. But anniversary-related exhibitions have been piling up around Berlin for months like the empty bottles of Pilsner at Alexanderplatz on a Saturday night. “FallMauerFall 61-89-09,” on view at the Ephraim-Palais museum, is a cut above the rest.

This ambitious show features works from three generations of artists from both East and West. Through paintings, sculptures, graphic design, performance art, photography, film and video, the exhibition provides a rich and often unexpected glimpse at how the Wall affected art in the two Germanys. The 300 works displayed in “FallMauerFall” show life on both sides of the barrier, and the joy and apprehension with which its fall was greeted.

The Ephraim-Palais, a replica of the rococo residence of the financier Vietel Heine Ephraim, is one of the most sumptuous buildings in Berlin. Modest in size, the Palais is part of a consortium of museums that deal with Berlin’s culture and history, and hardly the first place one would expect to find a groundbreaking art exhibit.

Dominik Bartmann, the show’s curator, is the exhibitions director for the Berlin City Museum. “We wanted to give another point of view, not just the jubilee, the happiness and the emotion,” he explained. “It makes no sense to show people coming to freedom without also showing the circumstances that led to that freedom,” he continued.

Read the rest here

Destabilizing the Opera Universe - an interview with George Steel

A.J. GOLDMANN

After years of playing second fiddle to its bigger, more imposing neighbor, the Metropolitan Opera, can New York City Opera regain its unique position in the world of classical music?

George Steel, General Manager and Artistic Director Opera of NYCO, which is set to reopen on November 5th after an extensive $107 million renovation, exudes confidence.

The renovations to the David H. Koch Theater (formerly the New York State Theater) include adjustments in the hall’s seating and acoustics, as well as a new state-of-the-art media center. The expanded orchestra pit can now accommodate up to 100 musicians.

With all these new resources at his disposal, Steel is eager to shake things up. “It’s great to destabilize a universe that people know like rosary beads,” Steel said.

Let’s not forget that NYCO was founded in 1943 as populist alternative to the more tradition-bound Metropolitan Opera. In the company’s 66-year history, it has presented 29 world premieres and 61 American premieres of works like Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. Let’s not forget that the company also launched the careers of many now-famous American singers, through their commitment to showcasing young artists. The roster includes Beverly Sills, Renée Fleming, Samuel Ramey. There have even been some minor European talents, like Plácido Domingo and José Carreras.

In recent years, NYCO seemed to have lost focus. It was increasingly artistically and financially adrift. While the Met had successfully revitalized its image under its new general manager, record producer Peter Gelb, NYCO struggled to attract audiences. The company, which was presenting a regular mixture of standard repertoire, repackaged Broadway fare and the odd new Handel production, had lost direction.

Under Steel, it seems that NYCO will finally be getting back to its role as “the people’s opera,” as mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia called it. But in this day and age, this means more than just offering affordable ticket prices. Steel wants to make opera intelligible to the guy off the street. If Peter Gelb’s has shown that opera can be financially viable in this day and age, then Steel – whose other job descriptions include pianist, conductor and impresario – has some pretty clear ideas about making opera artistically relevant.

The challenges that Steel faces suggest many of the larger concerns that contemporary opera and opera houses need to confront. How much will audiences tolerate new and possibly inaccessible works? How far should directors push the envelope in terms of onstage sex and violence, a recent question to emerge in the debate about Luc Bondy’s Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera? How to respect an opera house’s tradition and still attract new audiences?

“Traditional operatic repertoire and the audiences for them are getting smaller,” Steel noted, but with a positive spin. “But this is good news because you no longer need to chase the audiences. You can’t just presume that people are going to want to see masterpiece because they’re masterpieces. You need to entice them.”

The key for Steel is not to do “very old music with mildly radical stagings,” but rather to start with music that is “truly thrilling and radical.” “I have no fear about putting shocking things on the stage,” he says bluntly. Is that a promise or a threat? Steel declined to elaborate.

Steel can draw on his experience as Executive Director of Miller Theatre at Columbia University, which he ran for 12 years and turned into a vibrant destination for new music. “You want to sell out shows? Well, program composer portraits of Xenakis, Zorn, Ligeti, Varese, Nancarrow, and Reich. That’s six sold-out evenings right there,” he explained.

“I spend an enormous amount of my time putting these things on my radar.” Steel added that he is sifting through NYCO’s long-running program VOX: Showcasing American Opera, an annual performance forum for new composition, for what he calls “corn-fed American works” that have traditionally formed a backbone of NYCO’s programming.

The first production of the 2009-2010 season is a revival of Hugo Weisgall’s Esther, which was a 1993 world premiere here. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to program a little-known atonal opera as the season opener. Steel says of Weisgall’s musical language, “It’s like Alban Berg, but more like Bill Evans.”

It’s a move that seems to have paid off. Ticket sales for Esther are so strong that the company decided to add an additional performance.

With Steel at the helm, will the NYCO finally emerge from the long shadow of the Met? Over the past four seasons, Gelb has succeeded in making Met a fashionable and fabulous place to be. NYCO can hopefully capitalize off the rejuvenated image of opera that the new Met has projected through its commitment to fresh new productions and by embracing technology. But we’re going to have to turn to NYCO for the unsung masterpieces of the 20th Century, as well as the daring operas of the future. NYCO still has a unique part to play in New York’s cultural landscape. And in keeping opera relevant and fresh.

Hoping to build on the strength of my initial appearances at S.I.N.’s Comedy Night performing Borscht-Belt style comedy (a video documents my first performance and is available only on Facebook), I once again took to the stage this past Thursday, merely three days after returning to Berlin. Boy, was it a tough crowd! Under the circumstances, I think it went off pretty well. The great thing about the recording that I’m posting below is how you can’t tell when I lose my place and need to glance down at my notes! That, and the girl who was taking audio is laughing especially loudly - which creates the illusion that the whole bar erupted in peals of delirious laughter. Would that that had been the case.

Before posting this, I’m required by U.S. federal law to warn all minors that the following program contains obscene language, so please tune in kiddies!

p.s. - Apologies to my dog Alfie, who is in fact very much alive.

While the New York Philharmonic wraps up its Asian Horizons Tour, Avery Fisher is playing host to the London Symphony Orchestra led by Bernard Haitink. On Wednesday evening, the orchestra performed the first of two programs that pair symphonic works by Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler.  Contrasting these composers’ early symphonic styles seemed to be the order of business. However, it was hard to see how the works chosen for the program complimented each other.

Schubert was all of 19 years old when he composed his Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major. It is an eminently tuneful and balanced work that strikes equilibrium between form and material. It is also surprisingly modest in its instrumentation (it was written for a small community orchestra) and a piece that the composer viewed as an exercise towards learning how to write more sophisticated symphonic music.

Compared to the Schubert, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony in G major is gargantuan. However, for Mahler, who was 40 at the time of the work’s completion, it was something of a step back from the harrowing dimensions of the second and third symphonies. If Schubert was trying to expand the sonic dimensions of his work, Mahler was consciously pairing down from scaling the heights in the second and third symphonies. Compared to those works (and indeed all of Mahler’s symphonies) the Fourth seems surprisingly modest.

In the Schubert, Haitink elicited a smooth and well-balanced reading from the LSO musicians. The first movement began at a steady gallop, and maintained a moderate, even tempo. Amid clear, open textures, Haitink infused every reiteration of the theme with a different character.  He drew a warm sound from the plaintive horns in the Andante and the unison strings, playing with judicious vibrato, took on a sort of organic swelling quality. The finale was where Haitink’s tightly controlled performance allowed for the most dynamic fluctuations and muscular playing. Adding to the overall sense of drama was a prominent horn ostinato that was never too insistent.

Mahler’s Fourth is a piece that Haitink has recorded no less that four times. On Wednesday night, however, the conductor pushed the boundaries of how much transparency to allow the composer’s intricate orchestrations. Especially during the first movement, the winds and French horns played with heightened effect, often on par with the ebbing melodies carried by the violins. This caused problems by drowning out some of the first violin’s solos. Otherwise, the diaphanous texture that Haitink achieved was fascinating. One sensed a methodical approach tempered by emotional investment. For that reason, the performance never became a clinical dissection à la Boulez. Crescendos and other climactic moments erupted with surprising vigor and violence. But Haitink usually pulled in the reins tightly and efficiently. He also mostly eschewed rubato, even having the trumpets pay slavish devotion to the beat.

In the second movement, the virtuosic scordatura violin of concertmaster Gordan Nikolitch was routinely overpowered by brass. There was a rugged quality to the sinewy bass clarinet line. The echo of the Wunderhorn tune ‘Ging heut’ morgen übers Feld” had a lustrous and otherworldly sheen, though the whole movement sounded a bit too trim and manicured.

The sublime adagio, which I clocked at 22 minutes, was the fulcrum of this performance. Haitink’s equipoise and restraint resulted in an effective reading that never sounded maudlin. One miraculous moment: when the violins leap up a sixth and the gates of heaven open, the shimmering orchestra attained a transcendent quality. In a highly polished performance, this climax was at once noble and elemental.

The final movement enlisted the talents of Swedish soprano Miah Persson (who is currently appearing as Sophie in the Met’s revival of Rosenkavalier) whose “Himmliche Leben” was affecting pure and honest. Her voice that was clear in all registers and capable of great dramatic expression. Here, Haitink might have better reined in the musicians, especially after the mischievous ritornello with its bells and shrill winds.

These worthy performances should pique interest in Friday night’s LSO concert, which will pair Schubert’s Eighth Symphony with Das Lied von der Erde. Haitink will hopefully have an easier time drawing fruitful connections between these late-period works.

Magyar Madness!

A Sunday afternoon concert presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center packed Alice Tully Hall with a program of old and new music with a distinctly – and sometimes not so distinctly – Hungarian whiff that illustrated the pitfalls of overly varied programming.

It was an ambitious if lopsided program that buried Bartok’s challenging String Quartet no. 3 between works by Brahms and Erno Dohnányi and, in the second half featured the New York premiere of David Del Tredici’s “Magyar Madness,” a 35-minute work for string quartet and clarinet that the staunchly tonal composer wrote in 2006 for the clarinetist David Krakauer and the Orion String Quartet. The hard working Orion players are vigorous champions of new music, and formed the backbone of Sunday’s concert.

Pianists Alessio Bax and Annie-Marie McDermott kicked-off the concert with animated, frisky and sometimes seductive four-hand arrangements of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances nos. 6, 10 and 5. McDermott and Bax treated the dissonant sonorities with a breezy, fanciful way and with jarring attacks that were quirky and amusingly off-kilter.

Plopped in the middle of the concert’s first half was Bartok’s highly compressed Third String Quartet. The Orion String Quartet began with a sinewy, shrill and at times ghoulish sound with forceful attacks from the violins. A feeling of uneasy calm was established and preserved until the announcement of the dance-like melodies in the second movement. Here the musicians played with clear textures and rendered the composer’s instrumental techniques with overt care: the con legno rattling of bones and evenly-deployed pizzicato. In all, it sounded a bit antiseptic and unvaried. While the work sounded fluid in their hands, this was a tightly reined-in performance whose emotional content sounded stifled.

The final piece before intermission, Dohnányi’s Piano Quintet no. 2, seemed like a programming misstep. The lush neo-romanticism of Dohnányi’s shimmering work inhabits a different sonic universe from Bartok, this music that sighs and dances around so wistfully. While the rediscovery of lesser-known works is commendable, the quintet’s inclusion on this program detracted greatly from the power of the Bartok.

The concert again shifted gears for in the second half, which was dominated by Del Tredici’s energetic and tuneful “Magyar Madness” - a title that echoes clarinetist Krakauer’s own well-known ensemble “Klezmer Madness!”

If the Orion players were feeling fatigued, they certainly didn’t show it. In the first movement, Krakauer was in control amid the frantic swirling of the strings as he played a modulating series of sequences and plaintively sustained tones in music whose stylistic variety often sounded like mere pastiche. The fractal scales and shifting accents seemed little more than exercises.

The string writing often had a transparent texture, with some unexpected gestures like an intriguingly slow-motion flurry of pizzicato. Krakauer didn’t have much to do until the 20-minute-long finale, which began with a virtuosic rising scale that brought to mind the famous opening to Rhapsody in Blue and which was mirrored later in the movement by an equally precipitous descent. Throughout, Krakauer and the Orion players were kept equally busy with scales and arpeggios in a furious, chase-like music that competed with a tuneful Hungarian-style rondo that was nearly bludgeoned to death by repetition. The old-world melody was less convincing than the anguished klezmer-like high notes the Krakauer landed. And it was these wailing tones that rang truest, even if they seemed out of place for a wide-ranging piece that never fully explored its melodic material and rarely seemed more than an exercise in style.

It felt like a very long late afternoon for an audience that was edified through popular and challenging repertory standards, a rediscovered work and a premiere – and for a concert that struggled to be more than the sum of its parts.

The Swedish Academy announced the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature Thursday morning at 7 a.m. ET. This year’s winner is the Romanian-born German author Herta Müller.

In awarding the prize, the Academy called Ms. Müller an author “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”

This is the second consecutive year, the Academy has bestow the award on an author virtually unknown outside of his country. Last year’s winner was the French author and essayist, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. At the time of the award’s announcement, Le Clézio had one book translated into English. By way of contrast, Müller has four novels available in English, “Traveling on One Leg,” “Passport,” “The Land of Green Plums,” and “The Appointment,” and one short story collection, “Nadirs.”

Müller is also the second German-speaking female author to win in recent memory. The 2004 literature prize went to controversial Austrian author Elfriede Jelenik, best known for her novel “The Piano Teacher” (“Die Klavierspielerin”).

In recent weeks, rumors were circulating that Müller was on the short list for the prize along with prolific Amos Oz, who would have become the first Israeli to win that distinction, or the American novelists Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. An American author has not one the prize in the past 16 years. The last American recipient was Toni Morrison, who won in 1993.

The Nobel Prizes are considered highly political, which may explain why authors from America and Israel - two countries whose policies are often roundly criticized in Europe - have been denied the prize in recent years.

Here’s a biography of Müller from the Dickinson College website:

“Müller is a highly prolific novelist and essayist whose works portray the human destruction of the Romanian dictatorship and the rootlessness of the political exile.
She was born in August 1953 in the German-speaking village of Nitzkydorf, in the Banat district of Romania. She left her village to study German and Romanian literature at the University of Timisoara. Here she became part of the Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of idealistic Romanian-German writers seeking freedom of expression under the Ceaucescu dictatorship. After completing her studies she was employed as a translator in a machine factory, until she was fired for refusing to cooperate with the secret police. During this time she wrote the short stories that make up the collection Niederungen, but she had difficulty satisfying the censors, and this work was not published until 1982, and then in radically modified form. Niederungen was followed two years later by Drückender Tango.
In these two works Müller depicted the hypocrisy of village life and its ruthless oppression of nonconformists. She portrayed the zealously fascist mentality of the German minority, its intolerance and corruption. Not surprisingly, she was sharply criticized at home for destroying the idyllic image of German rural life in Romania.
Müller was working as a teacher when her uncensored manuscript of Niederungen was smuggled to the west and published by the Rotbuch Verlag to instant critical acclaim. After a trip to the Frankfurt book fair, where she spoke out publicly against the Romanian dictatorship, she was forbidden to publish in Romania. She continued to write, however, even as her situation in Romania became more and more intolerable. In 1987 she emigrated to the West with her husband, Richard Wagner. Since then, she has been living in Berlin.
Many of Müller’s works reflect aspects of her own history. Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (1986) chronicles the efforts of a Romanian-German peasant family to get passports to leave the country. Like her earlier works, this tale exposes the brutal corruption of the village by showing how its officials, from postmaster to priest, demanded ever more material and sexual favors from those petitioning to leave the country. It, like the collection Barfüßiger Februar (1987), was written while Müller was waiting for permission to emigrate to the west.
Reisende auf einem Bein (1989) portrays the problems of resettlement in the west, and the feelings of alienation that plague the political exile. Many of the essays in Eine warme Kartoffel ist ein warmes Bett (1992) are reflections on political events, written from the perspective of a woman reluctant to lay claim to words such as “homeland.” A second volume of essays, Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel (1991) includes a series of lectures on “Gedanken zum Schreiben” that Müller held at the University of Paderborn in 1989-1990. It is an indispensable key to understanding the tensions and conflicts that give rise to the poetic imagery in her work. The volume includes a number of collages combining image and text. Müller published a complete set of 94 collages under the title Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm. Vom Weggehen und Ausscheren in 1993; although poetic images are densely concentrated here onto single, unbound pages, they form an evolving network of motifs that give unity to the whole.
The novel Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (1992) is a complete reworking of a filmscript entitled “Der Fuchs der Jäger,” that she co-wrote with Harry Merkle. The main character is a teacher harassed by the Romanian secret police. Through synecdoche Müller portrays the fragmentation of self that occurs in a nation governed by fear. Müller’s latest novel Herztier (1994) is her richest portrayal to date of life in the Romanian dictatorship, in that she links the repressive childhood of her narrator with the brutal oppression of the state. Her most recent work, Hunger und Seide (1995), is a collection of essays, many of them reflections on her situation as nonconformist and dissident in Nitzkydorf and Timisoara.
Müller’s works are characterized by pure, poetic language and metonymic metaphors that recur and evolve throughout her tales. The oppressiveness of theme is alleviated by the beauty of her prose and the flashes of humor behind some of her imagery.
Through words and actions Müller continues to demonstrate her independence from the dogma of church and state. She has been an outspoken critic of those East German writers who collaborated with the secret police, and has recently withdrawn from P.E.N. as a protest against its decision to merge with its former DDR branch. She has won a dozen literary prizes, including the Marieluise-Fleißer Prize (1990), the Kranichsteiner Literary Prize (1991), the Kleist Prize (1994), and the European Literary Prize “Aristeion” (1995).”

Saturday night was the annual Long Night of the Synagogues, part of the Jewish Cultural Days that came to an end on Sunday evening. I wasn’t really planning on attending, but news of a concert by the Berlin Synagogue Choir (yeh - who knew?) a mere three blocks from my house roused me from my computer. I sped over to the Fraenkelufer Synagogue, a traditional congregation by the Landwehrkanal, a tree-lined tributary of the Spree that runs between Kreuzberg and its southern neighbor Neukölln. I was a few minutes late and had to make my way up to the ezrat nashim, or Women’s Gallery. Entering the sanctuary, I was stunned to discover how pack it was, and stared down from the gallery at the sea of black nylon yarmulkes bending in the direction of the choir loft, where the aforementioned “Berlin Synagogue Choir” (Berliner Synagogalchor)- five women and one of the synagogue’s chazzanim (cantors), Jochen Fahlenkamp, performed under the direction of Monika Almekias-Siegl, who accompanied on the electric organ.

The hour-long program consisted mostly of liturgical pieces, the majority plucked from Kabalat Shabbat, the tuneful Friday night service that welcomes in the sabbath day. The one exception was a lovely rendition of “Eli, Eli,” the well-known song based on the poem Halikha LeKesariya by the Hungarian-Jewish poet Hannah Szenes, who died as a partisan during the Second World War.

Here are some musical selections from that evening. Enjoy!

Benjamin Moser

Oxford University Press

July 2009

A.J. Goldmann

The French writer Hélène Cixous likened her to a female Kafka and the Elizabeth Bishop claimed she was “better than Borges.” In Brazil today, her books are sold in vending machines in subway stations and her image adorns postage stamps. But the Portuguese-language author Clarice Lispector has yet to secure a place of widespread literary recognition in this country.

Now, we have the first English-language biography of the writer from Benjamin Moser, New Books columnist for Harper’s Magazine.

The unfortunate dearth of translations of her works has meant the sensual and utterly unique prose of this “radical mystic author” is not as widely known as it should be. In the English-speaking work, her reputation mostly rests on the collection of short stories Family Ties and her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Pinkhasonva on December 10, 1920 in Checkelnik, part of the western Ukrainian province of Podolia. Her parent fled the pogroms that followed the Russian Revolution, and arrived in Brazil when Clarice was not a year and a half old. The family settled in Recife, where the first synagogue of the New World, Kahal zur Israel had been founded in 1637.

“Madame Bovary c’est moi,” the mysterious and beautiful author once responded to a journalist’s question about similarities between her and one of her fictional creations. Throughout this unique biography, Moser uses her novels as a key to unlock the mysteries of her life, which he often examines through the prism of Jewish mysticism.

“I am a mystic,” she once professed in an interview. Moser argues that Lispector struck out in search of the God who abandoned her and recorded that search through her writings as bound up in questions of language and its utility in understanding God. Moser claims that Lispector partook in the mystical experience by “removing language to discover an ultimate and necessarily nameless, truth.”

The connections the Moser makes between Lispector’s spiritual atheism and the Jewish mystical tradition is the most interesting part of his analysis, although he doesn’t give himself the space necessary to make a thoroughly convincing argument. For instance, Moser uses mysticism to fuse Lispector’s preoccupations with God and language as represented by “the great holy name of God, which for the Jews is simultaneously unknowable and the ultimate mystical goal.”

Following Gershom Scholem, Moser claims that “mysticism as a historical phenomenon is a product of crises.” Moser contends that the “tragic consistency” of the Jewish experience allowed Lispector to recreate ”the entire ethical and spiritual structure of Judaism” in her fiction. Jewish motifs are, he claims are, “reworked, disguised, but undeniably present,” he claims. But were they deliberate? In a footnote, Moser tells us that the Jewish ideas in her fiction “seem to have developed from her own insights, not from any prolonged study of other writers.”

The exception here is Spinoza. Moser mentions the recent discovery of a French anthology of Spinoza in Lispector’s library that explains the Spinozian echoes in her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. There she wrote: “Nothing else can be created, only revealed.” Like Spinoza, she rejected the idea of a conscious God as “horribly unsatisfying.” In essence, part of the vision of the novel is of the world as a constant flow, “an infinite chain of cause and effect.”

Lispector was often accused of being obscure and avant-garde, but she herself claimed to never be playing games. Moser makes a convincing argument for seeing her unique writing style as part of her lifelong quest for an “authentic language in which meaning and expression are finally united.”

In Near to the Wild Heart, Lispector wrote that “vision consists of capturing the symbol of the thing in the thing itself,” which Moser links to the mystical quest of “the word that has its own light”: “Just as God, in Clarice’s writing, is utterly devoid of any moral meaning, so does language signify nothing beyond what it expresses,” he argues.

Moser uses the cabalistic notion of striving for nothingness as a way of encountering the divine to describe Lispector’s agenda. Moser most successfully integrates his discussion of mysticism, Spinoza and language in discussing The Passion According to G.H. It is here, Moser contends, that she describes her encounter with God, whom she approaches only passing through “the opposite of the thing being approached,” until she reaches the conclusion that “beyond mankind, there is nothing else at all.”

As Moser shows, Lispector was not always a critical darling. Critics wrote of “the writer tangled in her own web of precious images” and prose that “succumbs beneath the weight of her own richness.”

Even after we’ve been being guided through “one of the most extraordinary careers in twentieth-century literature,” Lispector remains as cryptic as much of her fiction, since Moser serves us generous helpings of mysticism and literary criticism. It is equally puzzling when her reputation was made. At various points in the book, Moser tells us “by now, she was a household name,” or “she enjoyed a great reputation throughout Latin America.” The book leaves off with the author’s death in 1977 and does not discuss her posthumous reception and influence.

While the book is thoroughly researched and well written, Moser’s analysis of Lispector’s output is somewhat uneven (he hardly discusses Family Ties except to say that it “cemented her reputation”) and the book suffers in places from frequent repetition and a not a few grandiose statements.

For an author as radically individualistic as Lispector, it is difficult to compare her with other authors, and Moser rarely attempts this. Brazilian literary critics often drew connections with modernists, but Lispector herself denied the influence of figures like Joyce and Woolf.

In the end, “Why this World” is an uneasy mixture of biographical sleuthing, mystical exegesis and literary analysis; the last of which is most successful in discussing G.H. and The Hour of the Star, the work where “her inflexible individuality would find its last and greatest expression.” What isn’t as persuasive is whether Clarice truly “became her own fiction.” Even so, Moser should be applauded for writing a biography that will hopefully introduce Lispector to a broader readership.