In 2000, a failed surgery originally intended to restore functionality did his right hand in for good. Soon after, doctors found a tumor in his left. They removed it, along with any remaining hope of his fingers gliding over his beloved keyboard ever again.
So that's how João Carlos Martins finally lost his ability to play the piano. This is the story of how he got it back.
There is A peculiar moment at the beginning of every good novel. It has nothing to do with the story. You read page one, perhaps page two, and then you stop reading. You put the book down and slide it some distance away. This is good, you think. But already your schedule is crowded. Perhaps there is dinner to be made, children to bathe, some task to perform. It doesn’t matter. You know you only have 30 minutes or an hour to spare, and yet you know, after just one or two pages, that this will not be enough. This is one for open time. Not because it’s difficult or obtuse. Simply because it’s good. You already have that feeling of being in the flow and you don’t want the necessity of stopping to become a frustration.
Such is the feeling I had after just two pages of Tom Noyes’s new book, The Substance of Things Hoped For. This is an extraordinary novel, erudite and learned and also wonderfully compelling. I began, then stopped, then began again a day later when I had open hours. Every moment has been a joy.
Though his earlier books found an audience — and won big poetry awards — this selection makes the best way to get into Rosal, because it’s the first volume to show his range. To read these poems one after another is to experience a kind of double or triple vision: an American bedroom, an Ilocan coastal village, a Metuchen street. That vision leads, in turn, to felt connections, to loyalty as solid as Rosal’s firmest, longest lines.
Claire risks more than other sad-mom protagonists, pulling off a jailbreak that they only dream about. But her inner monologue, while seductively specific, isn’t always tortured. She experiences the pain of being away from her daughter, but she seems less anguished by how others—the white men in her head, perhaps—might interpret her. It’s as if Watkins is closing the door on the other novels’ agonizingly open questions, about whether a woman is “allowed” to pursue her art, or whether she’s a bad person for begrudging the black hole of time and selfhood that is a baby.
Paul Auster and Stephen Crane were both born in Newark. Other than that, you wouldn’t think they had a lot in common. Crane is among the least cerebral of writers. He’s interested not in ideas but in experience and sensation, which he describes in language that’s vivid, direct and often metaphorical. Auster, on the other hand, is the dean of American postmodernists, one of those writers whose books are always chasing their own narrative tails. His sentences are long, allusive and sometimes deliberately flat. But, for all their differences, Auster loves Crane and cares so much about his reputation that in this enormous, impassioned book he has taken it upon himself to restore him to his rightful place in the American canon.
Day and night come
hand in hand like a boy and a girl
pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish
painted with pictures of birds.