Yelena MoskovichVirtuoso

Abstract

work she declares herself androgynous and enters into a brief lesbian relationship. One of the most compelling aspects of the memoir is the author’s observations on life. Of being called the N-word she observes, “It would be the first but not last time some random antagonist would try to redeem history where I’m down and they’re standing.” Of the violence in the country she reveals, “I already know that the gun will be the only hero this country will ever have.” She calls Margaret Thatcher “an unchecked disease” as immigrant violence rages in London. She even supplies commentary on the Caribbean and black American tensions of the era. Then there is the host of unusual characters , her association with the Haitian American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and her joining the group the Guerrilla Girls, for which she is best known. The work often reads as impressions committed to a diary and is often as raw as it is rewarding. Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Yelena Moskovich Virtuoso Columbus, Ohio. Two Dollar Radio. 2020. 272 pages. FIRST PUBLISHED IN 2019 in the UK, Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso has been rereleased for US audiences. A novel with surrealist overtones, much like Moskovich’s first novel, The Natashas (2016), Virtuoso is set bilaterally in Paris and Prague with a couple of unflattering US cities thrown in for good measure. It is primarily a tale of lesbian friendships and romantic relationships, and Moskovich handles both deftly. Friends Jana and Zorka both grew up in communist Prague and share a forever bond. It may not be too far-fetched to say that the ravenhaired , outrageous Zorka is the Freudian id belletrists like Földényi to guide their deepest level of understanding. This idea of science as the destroyer of all magic, as disallowing us anything outside of the purely material, is naïve and dangerous , particularly in a time often characterized as “post- truth.” Science does not claim that our first-person experience of feelings or consciousness are not real or somehow less real. For now, they are simply not in the scope of our scientific possibilities, and perhaps they will never be. Claiming an evolutionary purpose for love does not diminish our love for a child, partner, or parent. Instead, one may choose to view an understanding of how evolution of past life imbued us with the capacity for love as elevating, rather than diminishing it. One cannot shake the feeling that Föld ényi, along with other postmodernists, understands the Enlightenment to stand for replacing lush green forests with coal plants and conveyor belts, replacing harmony and unity with the dissolution of our selves in a gray mass of empty bodies, slouching through ever-expanding blobs of concrete and steel. A strikingly ignorant view of human development over the past three centuries, which has seen reason , science, and humanism—the ideals of the Enlightenment—staggeringly improve equality, life expectancy, education, health, happiness—nearly any metric you might devise to track the evolution of conditions of human life. However, Földényi’s critique does not only follow the usual postmodernist track but comes with a decisive religious spin. In “Mass and Spirit,” he claims that our souls have mass—in fact, “our souls are nothing other than the ‘condensation’ of the divine mass,” he writes. According to Földényi, labeling ourselves as dead and soulless “masses” lets us regard ourselves as the “prime movers of the universe,” usurping “the role of the Creator.” The indifference to our spiritual roots, the refutation of God and the divine, to him, are the ultimate causes of “increase in population, the growth of human density, the proliferation of megalopolises.” His equation is as simple as it is naïve: Man used to be with God. Then came the ideals and products of Enlightenment that broke this unity. Man has been lost and tormented ever since. It is important to discuss how community and spirituality can survive in a modern, agnostic society. Sadly, Földényi’s critique never moves in this direction. It remains wholly unclear how exactly and to what exactly we are to go back to. In “Mass...