Sunday Books & Culture
This week’s reviews include Matt Haig’s hopeful novel “The Life Impossible” and the mystery of Bob Dylan in Elijah Wald’s “Dylan Goes Electric.”
Books & Culture is edited each week by Vanessa Sekinger
THE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE
by Matt Haig
Published by Viking (September 3, 2024)
Hardcover $18.16
Audiobook $15.75
Reviewed by Penny A Parrish
During COVID, I read dozens of books, sitting alone in front of my fireplace with a surly cat nearby. My favorite book was The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. My book club inhaled the words and messages and hope with greedy eyes. So, I looked forward to reading his next story.
We meet Grace Winters, a 72-year old lonely widow in England. She misses her husband and blames herself for the death of her young son three decades ago. Grace gets an email from a former student, who bemoans his current situation: girlfriend dumped him, his mum died, and his faith is dwindling. He does highlight that he is in his final year at university studying mathematics, which is what Grace taught.
Her response to this email is a 300-page story about herself. (Talk about needing an editor!). It turns out that a woman named Christina has left Grace a house in Ibiza. Grace provided a kindness to the other woman back in 1979 and has not seen her since, so she has no idea why she is the benefactor of this property. But lacking anything of interest in her life, she sets off for the island looking for answers.
She finds more questions than answers. Upon her arrival, various inhabitants make odd comments about strange happenings there. She finds the house in dire need of cleaning and a ratty old car in the driveway. She sees a plant and sends a photo of it to her sister who tells her the plant can’t be there because it went extinct years ago.
As Grace looks for answers, she meets Alberto, a beach-bum philosopher-type who knew Christina. He tells Grace she must go diving at midnight off his wreck of a boat if she wants answers. Grace reluctantly pursues this idiocy where she sees an underwater light and ends up in the hospital. She also ends up with some interesting superpowers.
The plots continue to evolve/revolve in magical ways filled with pithy thoughts and sayings about living life and finding happiness and dealing with grief and death. I found it all a bit of a slog. Perhaps we all need to believe in some magic or fantasy in our lives, but this is an overdose.
I will say I do love Haig’s writing at times. When Grace has surgery on her legs, she describes them as “more covered in blue veins than a chunk of Gorgonzola.” As she faces the reality of her age, she notes, “Sure, in each moment we have never been so old, but we are of course also the youngest we will ever be.” A thoughtful truism which I will carry with me after donating this copy to our library.
Penny A Parrish is a local writer and photographer. View her pictures.
DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC
By Elijah Wald
Published by Dey Street Books (June 14, 2016)
Paperback $15.19
Audiobook $12.03
Reviewed by Chuck Sekinger
Fans have listened to Bob Dylan’s early music for the last 60 years, but the lyrics are still a mystery. Through the movie A Complete Unknown, the mystery that is Dylan becomes a little less hazy, but is the story on the screen truth, or art, or both?
Does reading Dylan Goes Electric — the book the movie was based on — clear up any of those mysteries? Things like how he composed those lyrics, what really happened at the Newport Folk Festival, or how could this young man from the North Country changed the direction of music, culture, and social consciousness in just four years? Well, as the song goes, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”
For some answers, you have the movie, like the details of Dylan’s love triangle with Joan Baez and Susie Rotolo, the relationship between Dylan and the torch-keepers of the traditional folk music Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, the alleged fight at the festival between Albert Grossman and Alan Lomax, and Seeger raising an axe to the sound board during the electric set.
Well those answers are not in this book. At best, they are based on hearsay, conflicting eye-witness reports, and legend. You get to believe what you want to believe as true (as it perhaps was portrayed in the movie).
In Dylan Goes Electric, Elijah Wald lays out the elements that created the background of the 60’s folk movement from influences of early-century delta blues, 50’s rock n’ roll, traditional folk, to commercial folk (aka, Peter, Paul & Mary, Kingston Trio), to the British invasion. All of which influenced the music of Bob Dylan as he played it at the annual Newport Folk Festival in the early 60’s.
Wald provides meticulous details of all the artists and their influence on traditional, roots, and America folk music, and their annual invasion on the sleepy seaport town of Newport, RI, where they all came together in the 60’s for the preservation of the folk art form with concerts and workshops that promoted folk music as the antithesis to the popular music of the day (think Perry Como, Dean Martin, et al ).
Some folk artists were under the threat of McCarthyism persecution, notably Pete Seeger, which limited opportunities for a decent paycheck, and greatly reduced the folk fan base to the liberal college scene and Greenwich Village venues. The passion to preserve the folk art form with its sacred renewal of the “Festival” each year filled with adoring devotees, became the must attend event for a generation.
The true catharsis to this enduring tradition of the Newport Folk Festival came when Bob Dylan, the living incarnation of Woody Guthrie (who he channeled in every festival prior to 1965) broke into his an electric version of “Maggie’s Farm” causing shock waves through the audience of 15,000 adoring fans and shaking their fandom with a high-volume rock n’ roll set that left the audience divided.
Some liked it, since it reflected the performance of the Paul Butterfield’s Blues Band and the Chambers Brothers, who had also brought electric sound to the Newport Stage that year, while others were completely aghast at Dylan’s conversion from heir to the traditional folk culture, to a Rock n’ Roller. The author describes its impact as“the Night That Split the Sixties.”
Late in the book is where the theme takes shape in the division and disappointment of Pete Seeger with his young protégé. Dylan, it is assumed, saw his future in an instant and changed it. What else would you expect from the man that perhaps faked a motorcycle accident to escape fame, and later did not show up to receive a Nobel Prize for literature. You can read the book and enjoy the folk history, but Dylan will still remain a wonderful mystery.
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