Running Out of Luck
SCHWARTZ, LYNNE SHARON
On Fiction Running Out of Luck By Lynne Sharon Schwartz American and British reviewers of Gert Hofmann's novels tend to remark that this prolific German writer should be more familiar...
...Hijuelos is obviously enamored of his hero and knows how to win the reader's affection as well...
...It also includes the whole emotional history of a marriage that started out promising and turned sour, partly for the ordinary reasons— mutual incomprehension, sexual and temperamental incompatibility—and partly, it appears, from the inevitable entropy of all human enterprise...
...He was a creep...
...The unfulfilled romance feels willed rather than organic, a deliberate effort to wring sadness out of fate—as if it needed help...
...It may be in the seedy town of Dussdorf, or then again maybe in Berlin...
...Who is lucky here...
...The same arbitrariness clings to Levis' humiliation in Buchenwald, which he survives because the Nazis exploit his talents at their musical evenings...
...Mother, likewise fat, is a good deal younger, vain, and self-absorbed...
...It appears that your Mother no longer loves me...
...He survives only to return to Cuba shattered, unable to work...
...In addition, Hijuelos' major virtue—the easy grace of his style —is too often marred by repetition, sloppy writing, and distracting solecisms that should have been caught by an attentive editor...
...so that some of it might stick later: my street, my sky, my way to school...
...Come to think of it, he's Panlike in general...
...In the literal sense, they illustrate the near impossibility of marriage, given our intractable isolation...
...It appears that we're going to get a divorce...
...In five earlier novels, Hijuelos has been resourceful and inventive, always willing to try new modes of storytelling...
...rather, Levis is pansexual...
...More savvy than Levis, she and her daughter manage to elude the Gestapo...
...Father says that can be done by keeping very still...
...Levis himself delivers the message explicitly in one of many letters to Rita: "What does any song really mean, m the end, to the world, but a few moments of amusement, while the greater machinery of life grinds down so many people—among them, this old fellow...
...On Fiction Running Out of Luck By Lynne Sharon Schwartz American and British reviewers of Gert Hofmann's novels tend to remark that this prolific German writer should be more familiar to English-speaking readers, and I must follow suit...
...Luck is altogether smaller in scale and funnier, a mordant drama of a family coming apart...
...in each case the song catapults its composer to instant and enduring fame...
...Once again Cuban music in all its rhythmic variety, its exuberance and its melancholy, forms the texture of the narrative...
...the subjects recall how exacting the painter was, and how painful the pose...
...Mama is the widow Dona Concepción, watchful, cosseting, and deeply pious, who makes it clear she couldn't share her home or her son with the flamboyant Rita...
...Mother used to love Father and she no longer does...
...Nothing is impossible, for Father is a creature compacted of fantasies and rue...
...The love of his life is the glamorous singer Rita Valladares: He finds her in a church choir and fosters her meteoric career in a fondly avuncular way...
...the current novel unfolds mainly in Habana (the author's spelling), using that city as a richly colorful backdrop where the hero is supremely at home...
...Father and the two children spend much of the day together, brooding and talking, playing a card game called Happy Families, and listening to time pass...
...Despite the particularities of the nameless characters—Father's tobacco-stained fingers, Mother's shaved eyebrows and heavy perfume—they become disturbing archetypes...
...Vigorous Cesar Castillo was larger than life, Nestor somber and moody...
...He might have been one of fiction's amiable Casanovas, but for obscure reasons he mostly confines his largess to prostitutes...
...The boy cannot manage to get in a "goodbye mood...
...he is striking a deeper and more discordant note...
...Herr Forster was nothing like the man I'd taken him for...
...Like Cesar, his energies are superhuman and his accomplishments prodigious...
...If you don't talk to your wife regularly, she'll run away...
...Before I got out, I wanted to think about everything one last time...
...For part of that time Cuba was in the grip of the hated dictator Gerardo Machado, whose term was followed by almost incessant upheaval and instability...
...Rather than giving the warm farewell he longs for, the teacherreceives him rudely and mortifies him, declaring, "'you are not among the intellectual heavyweights of your year....' I shrugged my shoulders...
...It's not possible for someone to think any harder about packing than I am...
...the fact is as stark and irrevocable as the sun's journey, but except for Mother, no one in the devastated family can come to terms with it...
...until then he was chiefly known in his own country as a writer of radio plays...
...Not for a moment would he dream of acting on those fleeting impulses, but still...
...Mother passes the time shunting the children away, preferring to sit alone in her "boudoir" toying with makeup or going out to buy delicacies for Herr Herkenrath's impending visit...
...The nostalgic account proceeds in flashback and is told with warm sympathy...
...The anticipation of this crucial event shapes the narrative, which keeps circling around the impending departure, with excursions into flashbacks...
...I didn't care...
...Like many of his friends and colleagues, he left Habana for Paris to escape a repressive regime increasingly uncongenial for artists...
...He, too, offers a reality tilted maybe a quarter turn off center, demanding that the reader make a similar adjustment...
...When the conversation takes place at last, the children eavesdrop at the door...
...Luck is anything but boring...
...It is a singular look at conventional family life and a pessimistic gloss on received wisdom...
...A distinct difference is the setting: The Mambo Kings, along with other Hijuelos novels, takes place in New York and dwells on issues of displacement and self-definition in a new land...
...Hijuelos seems bent on bringing his hero to grief, as if to prove a point...
...He will take Father's place as soon as the moving van has arrived and she is rid of him ("so that there are no vacancies in the wedded world," Father says...
...He imagines the day will go on forever," Mother chides...
...The son, who won't be living with Herr Herkenrath, "a prize twerp...
...Unfortunately, about a third of the way through one begins to wonder what authorial motive other than affection is driving the story...
...What they hear is a hodgepodge of disjointed words, the most pungent being "longing" and "too late...
...Even more stunning, he is mistaken for a Jew by the Gestapo (because of his name) and ends up interned in Buchenwald...
...Or the daughter, who gets to stay with negligent Mother...
...But whereas Nestor worked all his life on the 22 revisions of "Bellisima Maria de mi Alma," Levis completes "Rosas Puras" in one heady afternoon and night (with the collaboration of his lyricist and dear friend, Manny Cortez, later killed by the secret police for his dissenting views...
...Privately lascivious (for he was a habitué of the brothels), publicly righteous, he was at heart a moralistic fellow," a seemingly simple but deeply mystifying statement...
...As is true of so many German-language writers, Hofmann is unmistakably descended from Kafka and Robert Walser, yet he is even closer kin to Continental dramatists like Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, or Friedrich Dürrenmatt...
...also like Cesar, his virility and its accompanying "magnificent instrument," never long forgotten, are the stuff of legend...
...A dark picture, but as in Beckett, there is laughter all the way, until the sun finally sets, the moving van arrives, and the trip into the unknown begins...
...Since neither boy can openly acknowledge his erotic feelings, in a nonsensically tender moment they try on each other's trousers instead, then part in terse awkwardness...
...In his Spectacle at the Tower (1984), a wretched married couple traveling in Sicily happens upon a town of daily horrors that culminate each night in a ceremony offering suicide as a spectator sport...
...Freudian casuistry is not Hijuelos' line—he is more given to lyrical romanticism—but he does offer a few hints...
...Father, whose erratic moods and wild pronouncements impel the action, is the most vivid character...
...Such an opening suggests the novel will follow that model, but in fact it reads more like a kindhearted biography or chronicle...
...In which he's absolutely mistaken...
...So I could remember later where I'd grown up, and could tell my children...
...How good it really was is dubious...
...Even though Father likes being cocooned in his messy study where the air reeks of "unhappy human being," he is companionable with his children and patient with the importunings of the little girl, whose insistent questions go uncannily to the heart of the matter...
...This curious timidity, or passivity, or ambivalence in the otherwise masterful hero is the melancholy ache at the heart of the book...
...In describing this music and those who created and played it, Hijuelos is at his unparalleled best, offering a kind of literary equivalent of The Buena Vista Social Club, Wim Wenders and Ry Cooder's great documentary film of Cuban pop music and its rediscovered performers...
...She's gone for a twerp this time...
...The original title, Das Glück, can also mean happiness or good fortune...
...Hofmann (1931-93) first began publishing his eccentric and haunting fiction in 1979...
...Our Conquest (1985) is a surreal and unforgiving examination of post-Nazi Germany...
...The Parable of the Blind (1986) derives from Pieter Brueghel's famous painting of six blind men staggering through a plain...
...In each, the writing is so acute and compelling that you can't stop reading...
...The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez ?'Brien (1993) ran the risks of plenitude, and Mr...
...Ives' Christmas (1995) tested the merits of restraint...
...Hofmann is not interested in bittersweet nostalgia, however...
...if they happened to ask...
...For one thing, Levis is a mama's boy until late middle age when exile brings release...
...Back then, the days were longer, and more fitted into them...
...His eventual exile is of a more tragic nature...
...He shares their sense of the absurd, their penchant for eliciting comedy from tragic circumstances and vice versa...
...This is not a sad tale of repressed homosexuality...
...Certainly his secret hankerings do not impede his passionate love affair in Paris with Sarah Rubinstein, a French Jew...
...For another, Levis is puzzled by his intermittent attraction to men...
...Israel Levis is a blend of both...
...Boring, said my sister...
...No one can quarrel with that...
...An adored child prodigy, Levis grows into an adored man, hugely successful, huge in every sense...
...Wandering through his childhood home and his beloved native city, he broods over the past, trying to understand how his life turned out as it did...
...But Luck is really the story of the boy as he faces the dissolution of all he has ever known...
...Like Nestor, Levis grieves over unfulfilled love and writes a song inspired by it...
...But a novel's machinery of life should run of its own accord, and remain discreetly concealed behind the veil of illusion...
...The precocious little sister, who wants to tag along, will remain with Mother and her new husband...
...Now he returns to the themes of the book that won him a Pulitzer Prize and an enthusiastic readership, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989...
...His unworldliness strains credulity...
...His exile began voluntarily...
...Luci (New Directions, 266 pp., $23.95), his seventh novel to appear in English, is a grimly comic romp through domestic misery, immensely readable and immensely unsettling...
...What does Levis' life, for all its incident and peregrination and sweeping emotion, add up to...
...Rita, 12 years his junior, loves Israel too and wonders, along with the reader, why he never declares himself...
...A Simple Habana Melody (HarperCollins, 337 pp., $24.95) is suffused with nostalgia for the Cuba of the first half of the 20th century...
...Before the family is divided, he will meet everyone at tea...
...He visits around town —an admired teacher, a beloved friend—only to find that what he has valued has been deceptive, is far flimsier than he realized...
...Like The Film Explainer (1995), it has been splendidly translated by the author's son, the poet Michael Hofmann, who lives in London...
...The book starts with a description of the zarzuela, one of the many genres Levis excels in: a Spanish musical theater piece originated by itinerant musicians of the 16th and 17th centuries, combining "folk songs, gypsy melodies, bits of poetry and prose, dance and stage trickery" in the service of a "simple and capricious plot—usually one of love or of the devastation of war...
...Dreamer that he is, Father still hopes for one last "conciliatory conversation" to "talk your mother round...
...Seeing an older boy he has an adolescent crush on leaves him unfulfilled in a sadder way...
...The protracted day includes walks around town, a final visit to the boy's school, and goodbyes to the townspeople, who are hungry for the latest gossip about the divorce...
...Apolitical by nature, intoxicated by his work and relishing his acclaim— "Rosas Puras" is played everywhere, the lionized composer is kept busy performing—Levis barely notices the war...
...We meet Levis in 1947, when he is 57 and just back from 15 years in Europe...
...The action is narrated by the boy, seemingly around 14 or 15...
...its subtitle is (from when the world was good...
...Beyond that, they show how unattainable is the "happiness" both Mother and Father seek, she through her ingenuous narcissism, he with his self-mocking irony...
...The German occupation of Paris stuns him...
...It takes place on "the last day of my childhood," and a long day it is, measured by his anxiously watching the relentless arc of the sun...
...She has Herr Herkenrath waiting in the wings...
...Israel Levis, renowned Cuban musician, composer, bon vivant, and hero of Oscar Hijuelos' new novel, also goes down to defeat, but first he enjoys decades of glory and absorption in his life's work...
...When a friend suggests he should be thinking of packing, he replies, "I'm thinking about it the whole time...
...Hijuelos' protagonist recalls the memorable Cuban Mambo King brothers...
...More corpulent with each passing year, his generosity and his appetites are correspondingly vast...
...The son, like a piece of obsolete furniture, is being ousted along with Father: "The boy, said Father, I will stuff under my arm and haul off...
...An allusion to the postwar division of Germany is conceivable, but I think an allegorical reading would be too far a stretch...
...Father and son await the moving van that will carry them off to their new apartment, some wretched hole Mother has found for them...
...Perhaps they will end up in Africa or New Zealand...
...And yet the musician, born into a comfortable, loving family, his genius recognized and nurtured at a young age, manages to spend 50 years in a radiant bubble of music, sensuality and mystical Catholicism before politics and World War II engulf and virtually destroy him...
...Even chronicles must do more than simply trace an arc of passage to its inexorable decline...
...Father is f iftyish, fat, slovenly, a failed novelist who compares himself to Thomas Mann and is given to hilariously pompous remarks on his marital woes, his "protracted suffering," the fate "plummeting toward me with ever-increasing velocity...
Vol. 85 • May 2002 • No. 3
