My Mother Was an Upright Piano by Tania Hershman

Abstract

reviews “full of voices,” conquers the Parisian stage. Meeting accidentally at Luka’s first Parisian art show, they consummate their childhood love. But upon Luka’s return home to arrange their wedding, his Zagreb girlfriend, Klara, uses pregnancy to trap him in a wretched marriage, and he trades art for hotel work. The lovers’ lives thereafter intersect only at inopportune moments, assuring that love is repeatedly found and lost. The structure foreshadows and underscores their heartache. Their last meeting opens the novel, as Dora reveals that she has recently married and that her teenaged, buddingartist son is Luka’s. The penultimate chapter repeats that first scene verbatim , and the final chapter ends with their mantra—“What do we do now?” “Let’s get out of here.” But even though fate has given Luka an exit—he has learned that he did not father his first child with Klara— Dora is now married. One initially suspends disbelief, accepting Dora’s improbable precocity , Luka’s repeated faints, and Dragnić’s mirroring technique (e.g., at the moment Luke is wounded during the siege of Dubrovnik, Dora “wakes with a faint cry” in Paris) as traits of the genre—fairy-tale romance cum magic realism. But plot structures, passages, and pages repeat throughout the text. Thus, whenever they meet, Luka faints, Dora revives him and calls him her “prince,” and both think “I will love you, only you, always you, my whole life long—you are my breath, my heartbeat, etc.” Chronically passive, Luka, less Prince Charming than Sleeping Beauty, twice tells Dora, “I was weak,” and when he twice returns to Makarska, “the bus enters the city, and if Luka’s eyes were open, he would see the bus station. And Klara.” Such self-referential motifs telegraph plot and emotion but lack thematic richness. Straining credulity , they move the novel closer to burlesque than to tragedy. Every Day, Every Hour aims high: its final scene leaves the protagonists “like two tragic characters in a Shakespeare play. Like two lost children. Against the backdrop of nature’s power.” But when one (which is unclear) asks, “Do you know what this whole story amounts to?” the other answers, “A history of the countless pregnancies that changed the world.” That “world” only their own, these narcissists lack the depth of tragic figures . Though it promises a haunting romance, the novel more resembles Nicholas Sparks than Shakespeare. Michele Levy North Carolina A&T University Tania Hershman. My Mother Was an Upright Piano. Bristol. Tangent. 2012. isbn 9781906477608 My Mother Was an Upright Piano is Tania Hershman’s second collection of very short stories—her first, TheWhite Road and Other Stories, was commended by the judges of the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. Her presentation of the tragedy and the oddity of our human lives is the typed equivalent of a performance artist at MOMA: strange, unfamiliar, captivating. The universe’s dark energy palpitates on Hershman’s pages; she gives emptiness form. Characters struggle to communicate, to make themselves known to others. Hopes for the world to be other than it is are met with silence. Longing blankets the text. Sentences stop before they reach their conclusion, words omitted by the author in sympathy with the reticence of her fictional creations. The unsaid contains both dagger and salve, and Hershman’s silences both break and heal the heart. The beautiful story “Life Breaks Out” is a manifesto of Hershman’s sense of the tragic indifference of the world into which we are thrown. The story starts, “Life was small . . . Life curled up to make itself even smaller, to fit into the kinds of holes that insects crawl into to get away from bigger insects. Life was sad.” As Life grows, the significance of a mother and child boarding a small boat wanes. The story ends, “Life looked down and saw a tiny boat with tiny people. Life couldn’t remember being that small, let alone as miniscule as an insect. . . . Life blew a little on the tiny boat. Life watched as the tiny boat swayed and tilted, dipped and dove, sank and disappeared. Then 62 World Literature Today David Harsent In Secret: Versions of Yannis Ritsos Enitharmon British...