Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 4, 2003)
Winter Reading Sculptor Pete Helzer’s The Storyteller. Honoring Oregon’s own, Ken Kesey. 2003-2004 Time for a warm fire and a good book — EW reviews the glitterati of the literati for your reading pleasure. Enjoy! FICTION Novels Music for Peace The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason. Vintage Books, 2002. Paperback, $14. F rom the onset, the premise of Daniel Mason’s debut novel com- pels. The year is 1886. Edgar Drake, a shy, inward piano tuner who spe- cializes in working on Erhard grand pianos is told that his services are needed in re- mote British Burma. The year before, a physician, soldier and self-described poet who had succeed- ed in forming several alliances with the area’s ruling princes had convinced the British Army to deliver him an Erhard grand piano. Now it needs tuning. Drake agrees to brave the wilds of Burma to tune the piano owned by the mythical Surgeon- Major Anthony J. Carroll who, it is rumored, uses music, not arms, to create peace. Drake has embarked on a quest whose outcome he cannot begin to fathom as he packs his tuning tools and prepares to leave his wife, Katherine, who supports his journey. Drake is mesmerized by the panoply of color, sounds and people he observes on his journey. But slowly he begins to awak- en to the shadow side of his journey. A careless hunting accident in India alerts him to the inevitable: 12 DECEMBER 4, 2003 He feels already that a tear has begun, irreparable, like bits of paint lost as dust to the wind in the ripping of a canvas. It has changed everything, he thinks. This is not part of my plan, my contract, my commission. As the story deepens, Drake loses hold of the order that for so long has defined his life. The sky heaves with rain. He loses his way in the damp, thick landscape. The Major is not the man Drake expected to encounter. His mission is not what he thought it was. He fights to retain his polit- ical and moral neutrality, but the jungle that is late 19th century Burma is thick, deep and consuming. Mason has a stunning command of place and time. His details of music, land- scape, scents and sound are intimate and true. The narrative pacing stammered toward the end, and I grew impatient with the exotic, idealized female character with whom Drake becomes entangled. Still, The Piano Tuner is an absorbing, fulfilling read and a laudable first novel. — Alice Tallmadge The Many Faces of Home When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka. Anchor Books, 2002. Paperback, $9.95. J ulie Otsuka’s concise, understated novel tells the story of one nameless family among the 120,000 Japanese- Americans forced to leave their homes, jobs, schools and pets during WWII “for their own protection.” In 1942, the night after Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrests a middle-aged Japanese- American man. His kids, who’ve never seen him leave the house dressed in less than suit and hat, watch him taken away in his bathrobe and slippers. Six months later, following U.S. government instruc- tions, his family packs up their comfort- able Berkeley house in readiness to go away, too — where, they don’t know. The family is taken by train first to San Francisco, where they spend the summer living in horse stalls with other detainees and then to a concentration camp in a pow- dery dry Utah desert for three years. In the absence of any real activity, with long lines for meals and showers, each desert day seems longer than the last. Known simply as a boy, a girl, a mother and a father (who’s held at a separate camp), the family relies on letters and on each other to stay above despair. Otsuka’s unembellished storytelling handles troubling details in an almost bland manner. You sympathize with her characters and want them to make a noise against the indignity of their imprison- ment, but they don’t. Two-thirds through the novel, however, Otsuka’s impersonal tone changes into a defiant first-person narrative. It’s almost like a bitter return to consciousness after a long period of numb- ness. Japanese-Americans were returned to the “outside world” after almost four years, with train fare and $25, about the same as given to released convicts. But as Otsuka shows in this dignified, moving novella, the end of the war doesn’t bring back what these families have lost: They can never truly go home again. — Kaukab Jhumra Smith Character Formation Old School by Tobias Wolff. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Hardcover, $22. T obias Wolff’s first novel reads like a memoir that takes fictional liber- ties, and Wolff has intimated as much in recent interviews. Novel, memoir or something in-between, Old School is a
