Wrapping Up

Time for some short takes to clear the desk for the coming year.

In Urs Widmer’s Der Geliebte der Mutter (My Mother’s Lover) the first-person narrator tells the story of his mother’s life, beginning with the death of her lover, many years after her own death. Erwin died as he lived best, leaning over a conductor’s stand with an orchestral score in his hand. When the narrator’s mother was young, her family was rich. He gives much of the family history, going back to an unnamed African who started the family line on the Italian side of the border, through his maternal grandfather who crossed into Switzerland in the late 1800s and built a small fortune through luck and hard work. This man’s daughter, the narrator’s mother, had an upper-bourgeois childhood, but one marred by her mother’s early death and her father’s emotional distance. She had a peculiar “way” from childhood, and Widmer leaves an open question of how much this peculiarity was an inborn mental condition and how much it might have been a response to her upbringing. As a young woman she encounters Erwin, who is poor and just starting the Young Orchestra (YO), a counterpart to the unnamed Swiss city’s stodgy traditional orchestra. She gradually assumes an organizing role with the YO and is increasingly taken with Erwin, who assumes it is natural that someone else will take on the work behind the scenes so that he can concentrate on making music and encouraging composers. During the YO’s first international engagement, in Paris, the two of them fall into bed. She is never quite the same, he continues his rise to prominence in music and, later, in business. He eventually marries someone else. She does, too: the narrator’s father, who is never named in the book, never depicted in a scene, and who finally disappears from the narrative entirely. Widmer packs a great deal into this short book — poverty, art, an Italian family, fascism, wartime Switzerland, music, success, mental illness — but it never felt programmatic. It’s a portrait of a quietly dramatic life, one that takes place alongside wealth and fame, a life that shows the collateral costs of one kind of rise to prominent, a life that shows what near-madness can look like up close. For one person, a lifelong love that the other barely notices.

Empire of Refugees explains its two nouns in the subtitle “North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State.” As the back matter relate, “Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire.” The largest share of these people were Circassians, as told at full length and from another perspective in Let Our Fame Be Great, though there were also Chechens, Dagestanis of various sorts, and other peoples. They settled in Anatolia, the Levant and Iraq. The modern city of Amman, Jordan’s capital, began as a Circassian settlement among ancient ruins, and even today the King of Jordan has a special group of Circassian bodyguards. Hamed-Troyansky has written an exemplary and fascinating history. He commands the languages of the original sources, and he is attentive to nuance and to changes over time in both the refugee experience and in the state and lands that received them. He shows how the meaning of the term “refugee” changed over the decades of conflict between the Russian and Ottoman Empires. He shows the different ways that people tried to adapt to new conditions, from integrating themselves as completely as possible in new cities to trying to recreate as much of their homeland as possible in the hinterlands of Ottoman Anatolia. Some of those legacies last into the present, with Circassian villages in central Anatolia preserving old forms of the language and other traditions that were lost in the North Caucasus, especially during the Soviet period. Along with statistics that give an overview, Hamed-Troyansky uses diaries and letters to allow the refugees to tell their own stories, showing the human detail and complications within the larger movements of peoples. The refugee movements that Hamed-Troyansky also shaped how modern states conceived of and set policies for displaced persons, a subject that is still very much at issue today. He accomplishes all of these tasks in 250 pages of main text, supported by nearly another 75 detailing his sources, many of which are primary documents, probably brought into international historiography for the first time. Empire of Refugees is, simply, a fascinating and brilliant book.

I bounced off The Wood Wife the first time or two I tried to read it, but apparently I was just waiting for the right time because this, too, is a brilliant book, though of course very different from Ottoman history. Maggie Black is a writer, but she has long been in the shadow of her now ex-husband, a famous musician. As The Wood Wife opens, Maggie is the beneficiary of an unusual bequest. Davis Cooper had been a poet, famed in post-war New York but increasingly reclusive as the years went on and finally reluctant to leave the rural Arizona area where he had built a home. Years ago, Cooper was something of a poetic mentor to Maggie, though they never met in person. She asked to be his biographer; he declined. When Cooper died under peculiar circumstances, though, he left Maggie his house and his papers, and gave her permission to write that biography. The Wood Wife is filled with mysteries. In an introduction, Delia Sherman notes some of the most obvious. “Why did Davis leave his house to a woman he had never met? Was he the father of the young man who lives on his property? What drove his painter lover from the desert she loved? How in the world could he have drowned in a dry riverbed?” The Wood Wife is about mystery: of art, of people, of relationships, of the land, of the spirits of a place. Some of those mysteries play out in different combinations; others are resolved; still others remain mysterious, though not entirely obscured. It is a book to dive into, for all that its setting is a dry desert, a book that captures American rhythms, for all that its story reaches back to a time before the Americans arrived, and a book whose impressions have lasted, for all that the moments Windling describes can be as fleeting as the wind.