Vermeer in Bosnia : Cultural Comedies and Political Tragedies

Rating:
Summary: Thinking About the Unimaginable
Review: I'd admired the writing of Lawrence Weschler for years through his writing for The New Yorker. (And it's WESCHLER, not WECHSLER as I'd misread it for the longest time.) He is one of the better essayists around and has some of the qualities that make that possible: an insatiable curiosity, the drive to pursue a topic to its inmost meaning, a mind that makes connections between seemingly disparate notions, an ability to empathize with people he writes about, a drive to explore almost unimaginably emotionally powerful situations, and a graceful prose style. This book collects twenty or so more-or-less unrelated pieces written over twenty years and on a variety of subjects. He has grouped them, however, into related areas: A Balkan Triptych, Three Polish Survivor Stories, Grandfathers and Daughters, Three L.A. Stories, Three Portraits of Artists, and a postlude, 'A Final Vermeer Convergence.'

The title piece, 'Vermeer in Bosnia,' is about the Hague War Crimes tribunal and derives its title from the tribunal judge who day in and day out has to listen and look at evidences of the horrors of the genocidal acts taking place in the former Yugoslavia; he confesses that he restores his peace of mind by going to visit the Vermeers at the nearby Mauritshuis Museum. This theme of the horror of war and racial intolerance (and the human emotional interconnections in spite of them) runs through the entire book. Roman Polanski's chaotic childhood in WWII Poland. Graphic novelist ('Maus') Art Spiegelman's parents' physical escape from concentration camps but their inability to escape in their minds. The story of Weschler's own grandfather, the celebrated Austrian composer Ernst Toch and his repeated relocations due to the political situation in Europe. (As primarily a classical music CD reviewer, I have reviewed recordings of music by Toch which is having a resurgence, but had had no idea until I read Weschler's piece about him that he was the composer's grandson. There is a short piece about a since recorded major work of his, a Passover choral work, 'Cantata of the Bitter Herbs,' which is available here at Amazon.)

There are also pieces that celebrate the ineffable connection between fathers and their daughters (or grandfathers and granddaughters). There's a charming piece (from the NPR program 'This American life') about his own daughter's firm belief in the existence of the Borrowers (Mary Norton's children's book characters). I had to chuckle because the Borrowers live at our house, too. There are pieces about Weschler's own beloved Los Angeles in an article about an LA native's high school years, about the unique quality of the light in LA, and his own (and others') experience of the Northridge earthquake.

Finally, there are three wonderful pieces about artists David Hockney, Edward Kienholz and most remarkable of all, Ed Weinberger, who is all but paralyzed by a particularly vicious form of Parkinsonism but who continues to turn out the most meticulously crafted three-dimensional pieces with the help of an extraordinarily talented younger artist, Scott Schmidt. (Weinberger was the inspiration for Robert de Niro's character in the movie 'Awakenings.')

This is a book to dip into at leisure, but be prepared to find yourself engaged, even entranced, while you are also being shocked, horrified, amused and moved.

Scott Morrison

Rating:
Summary: Wise, Enthralling, Insightful
Review: In this collection of his essays, written over the past two decades, Lawrence Weschler reports on the summits and troughs of human endeavor. He's often wise, sometimes enthralling, and always insightful.

The opening essay, "Vermeer in Bosnia," is worth the price of the book by itself. The setting is The Hague during the Yugoslavian War Crimes tribunal. He contrasts horrifying testimony about war criminals with the career of the famous Dutch artist Jan Vermeer, whose paintings are on display in a nearby museum. Weschler shows us that Vermeer's greatest achievement was to imagine a world of stillness and serenity at a time when all of Europe was being torn apart by national hatreds and religious persecution, and then to will that world into existence through his art. Those magnificent paintings are more than technical triumphs; they are triumphs of the human spirit. The distance between Vermeer and the murderers, rapists and torturers on trial is heartbreaking. Weschler makes us see Vermeer in a new light, and makes us feel in a new way the unique burdens of being human.

The second essay in this section uses Shakespeare's Henry V to shed light on the Serbian massacre of thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica. The final essay, "Aristotle in Belgrade" reports on Serbian students using the great philosopher as a propaganda weapon against the state police. Unlike Aristotle, though, these students and the rest of the Serbian citizenry abandoned moral discrimination and particularity in favor of dogma and propaganda. Thinking in slogans led to a collective madness that drove the Serbs to commit unspeakable atrocities and then refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Given the current situation in the Middle East, these essays are timely warnings as well as valuable historical records.

Three Polish Survivor Stories, include portraits of film director Roman Polanski, graphic novelist Art Speigelman, and publisher Jerzy Urban. The Polanski essay is fascinating for its psychological portrait of a man who survives by simultaneously mining and jettisoning his past. The most intriguing essay is about Urban, a Jewish boy who survived anti-Semitic persecution to become a young anti-government radical, and, as an older man, a much-reviled government spokesperson for the regime of General Jarulzelski. After that regime collapsed, Urban transformed yet again, this time into a highly successful purveyor of tabloid smut. A cynical, unassimilated survivor through all of it, Urban comes across as both victim and brilliant manipulator of Poland's tortuous postwar politics.

The Grandfathers and Daughters section contains six pieces that include Weschler's daughter as well as his grandfather, the composer Ernst Toch. Unlike the big screen portrayals in the rest of the book, the writing here has the narrower appeal of home movies: some heartwarming moments, but more meaningful to the family than the rest of us.

The most captivating of the Three LA Pieces is "The Light of LA," which is a paean to its clarity and consistency and, paradoxically, its enfolding softness. By interviewing artists, cinematographers, climatologists and astronomers, Weschler lovingly deconstructs the interpenetration of light and air that occurs in LA, a place where the desert, the ocean and tons of industrial particulate matter all meet. The other two pieces are a nostalgic ride with the artist Robert Irwin through LA in the Forties, and a first person account of the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

The final section, Three Portraits of Artists, contains two beautifully made works of narrative art. "True to Life: David Hockney's Photocollages," begins with Hockney picking up a point and shoot Polaroid camera to make some quick collages. What starts as an attempt to introduce a temporal dimension to still photography evolves into a deep exploration of the nature of perception. Hockney's historical guidepost is the cubist way of seeing pioneered by Picasso and Braque. The Cubists realized that fragmenting an image forced a viewer to take more time to truly see it. Hockney progresses from fragmenting a photographic image to removing the fixed edges of the rectangular photos "because there are no edges to seeing." Next, he places himself in the pictures because seeing also involves where the viewer is in relation to what's being seen. Finally he tries to remove the static nature of the object being viewed by introducing different time sequences in the same collage. (Weschler helpfully provides reproductions of the photocollages he's describing.) It's an exhilarating ride through the mind of a major artist working on nothing less than "the revitalization of depiction."

The final essay, "A Parkinsonian Passion," covers the unique career of Ed Weinberger. Weinberger was a classics major turned successful investment banker who in his early forties was stricken with Parkinson's disease. A keen, driven mind was suddenly trapped in a balky, sputtering body. Weinberger turned his considerable mathematical abilities to designing furniture whose specifications had tolerances as precise of those of aircraft or other sophisticated machines. His most useful tool turned out to be the carpenter Scott Schmidt, who built the pieces that Weinberger designed.

As his body grows increasingly beyond his control, Weinberger strains for greater precision and perfection in his art. Doing this work helped focus his body and gave him a way to strike back against the oppressive inexorability of his disease. Like Vermeer in the opening essay, Weinberger's story is one of spiritual as well as artistic triumph.

Like Hockney and Weinberger, Weschler is an artist who makes us see familiar things in a new way.






Rating:
Summary: A Serious Man Who's Good Company
Review: Three of the Wechsler books I own were bought at the beginning of bus trips from South Station, Boston, so to me the New Yorker writer is more of a Hub hero than Johnny Damon or Joe Perry. If you can't make it to Barbara's Books, you won't go wrong online with this, but you might consider one of his slimmer volumes (Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder for the art, A Miracle A Universe for the justice) as an introduction to this worthy compilation.