Middle C by William H. Gass

Abstract

Nota Bene Rosemary Catacalos Again for the First Time Wings Press This handsome thirtieth-anniversary edition of Again for the First Time reintroduces the work of award-winning poet Rosemary Catacalos. Her poetry sings with classical and folk influences, balancing what transpires today with timeless and enduring observation. Honored as the 2013 poet laureate of Texas, she celebrates her deep roots in Texas and her ties to both Greek and Mexican heritages. Vahni Capildeo Utter Peepal Tree Press Vahni Capildeo turns words into scenes of total sensory immersion in her new verse collection, Utter. Her poetry weaves rich imagery of an alternate reality that asks you what the nature of life really is, and this question is both complicated and complemented by the diverse configurations and formatting of her verse. Nota Bene pathetically, he collides with his son’s mother’s abhorrence of him for having raped her, into her unwillingness to relinquish the child, and into the unprofessed homosexuality that is his muddled life’s source of vexation. While the runaway Claire remains in hiding, these and the rest of the novel’s character ensemble circle dolefully about, employing and observing Danticat’s signature tropes for the undervoiced Haitian people’s dire-straits desire to be heard (also, for her own authorial determination to give them voice): radio stations, lighthouses, sign language, butterflies (whose fate is to be immemorially /memorially both mute and beautiful ), and wonns (a Haitian children’s singing game similar to the English “Ring a-ring o’ Roses”). Claire of the Sea Light is not Danticat ’s best work. Too many of the novel’s pages roil in her characters’ disconsolate ruminations. Still, the fiction holds because its chief suspense —concern for the runaway child and curiosity about what she will do— holds. Also, it ends brilliantly. To tell you the ending would spoil the novel, so I won’t do that. I will only say that when life challenges Claire to act, the child does so decisively and without complaint. She runs in the sea’s light, also hope’s light. John Cussen Edinboro University William H. Gass. Middle C. New York. Knopf. 2013. isbn 9780307701633 The protagonist of Middle C is one Professor Joseph Skizzen, head of the music department at Augsberg Community College, later Whittlebaurer College. As a boy, he was moved from Austria to England in the 1930s, the family assuming the guise of Jewish refugees, ahead of what his father sensed would be a catastrophe. After the father decamped to America, Joseph and his mother were relocated to the Midwest, where Joseph found that being Austrian and at least nominally Lutheran helped secure an academic position. Championing the music of Arnold Schoenberg was timely as well. His private obsession is located in an attic workroom pasted with clippings of massacres and gruesome crimes seeming to affirm that catastrophe is normal, that humanity itself is a catastrophe. Instead of writing learned articles on his favorite composer , Joseph meditates in his attic and endlessly modifies a doomsday sentence that originally reads, “The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.” All might be well if the professor were able to quit circling this one sentence. While the boy and man built an enviable reputation on his ability to ingest books and music, the attic man seems stuck in a purgatory of repetition. The problem a reader confronts is twofold: Skizzen’s condition is March–April 2014 • 57 reviews established early, with flashbacks to bring him to the present. What is not brought to the present is an explanation for his anal-retentive habits. He was a youth with some extraordinary talents who has not achieved. Described as he is from the outside , thoughts and material activities named, often as catalog lists, Joseph Skizzen is known and unexplained, known and uninteresting. The lack of enduring personal relationships is troubling. As a professor at a small college, he should be in close contact with a number of students. Then there are the faculty and committee meetings and, often, expectedsocialeventswithcolleagues. Such encounters are almost completely absent. Possibly the academic sections are fantasized, which explains the lack...