You Want It Darker

The sad news that Leonard Cohen died arrived tonight, during an already difficult week most of us are still coming to terms with.

I've been listening constantly to Leonard Cohen since his new album, You Want It Darker, came out a few weeks ago. I heard the title song on the radio just after Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of Atonement. I'm certain the release date was intentional. Cohen sings,

If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame

Magnified, sanctified, be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame
A million candles burning for the help that never came
You want it darker

Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my lord

Cohen, known to be suffering from back pain, speaks of our human failures, and also God's. After this week's election, we kill the flame, seems especially poignant to me. However, it's the Hineini part that made me stop in my kitchen and stare at my ancient radio. Hineini means, Here I am,  in Hebrew. It's what Abraham says to God just before he is about to sacrifice his only son Issac. At the last moment God asks Abraham where he is, Abraham says Hineini, and his hand is stayed. 

The Akedah, or binding of Issac is difficult to resolve. I'd thought it was a test of Abraham's devotion to God, but according to my rabbi, no one really knows what to make of it, or why we read
it during Rosh Hashana services. And yet, I love that Cohen uses this line, Hineini, here I am, to address God. It seems as perfect as his use of other parts of the high holiday liturgy, like Who By Fire. I also love that the choir that sings on the track is from the Shaar Hashomayim shul in Montreal, where Cohen's family were members for generations. (It's also happens to be the shul my Bubbie worked at for a time.)

Several other writers have written far more eloquently about Leonard Cohen recently. I loved Liel Liebowitz's piece for Tablet Magazine, and also David Remnick's excellent piece in The New Yorker.

Three Great Fiction Titles

I've read some amazing fiction titles recently, books that are definitely going to be on my top ten list at the end of the year. The first is the Man Booker Prize nominee Hot Milk by Deborah Levy.  I chose to read this because I loved the title. (Although having read the book, I have no idea why it's called Hot Milk.) It's a bewildering book, but so beautifully written, I didn't want to put it down.

This is the story of a young British woman, Sofia,  who travels with her mother to a medical clinic in Spain. The mother suffers from paralysis and a host of other medical conditions. Her illness holds Sofia's life in limbo, creating another kind of paralysis. In Spain, Sofia meets a various characters, my favourite being a German woman named Ingrid. At one point Ingrid embroiders Sofia a silk halter with the words beloved in blue thread. Later Sofia realizes the embroidery says something entirely different, changing her experience of their relationship. This book feels brief but its lasting images will be with me a long time.


One can never have too much Pride and Prejudice, right? Especially when it is re-written by the excellent Curtis Sittenfield into a novel called Eligible. This is a modern update of Pride and Prejudice, full of cross fit gyms, texting and reality TV.

The Bennett family has five unmarried daughters, a horrible mother and a droll father, but in this version they live in Cincinatti. Elizabeth Bennett is a New York journalist not interested in Mr. Darcy, here imagined as a pompous surgeon. 

Mrs. Bennett is especially odious in Sittenfield's update. Not only is she a racist snob, but she suffers from a shopping addiction and poor parenting skills. She also loves reality TV shows, including a show called Eligible, which stars Chip Bingley. When Chip comes to Cincinatti, well, you know how the story will unfold.


I've read several books by Sittenfeld, and she is unrelenting in her skewering of people across social millieus. I loved her collection of stories Prep, and even more so her fictionalized version of Laura Bush, American Wife.  Eligible would be a great gift for the holiday season.


Edna O'Brien's The Little Red Chairs is a very different and somber book. It's the one that I'm going to re-read, to buy for other reading friends and to recommend to my book club.

The Little Red Chairs is the story of an Irish woman's life that is changed forever when a healer moves to her small town.  The woman, Fidelma,  falls in love with the healer only to later learn that he is a Bosnian war criminal. The Guardian describes this book as "a chilling masterpiece," to which I agree. I love O'Brien's prose, her attention to detail, and her masterful control of the story's twists and turns as Fidelma travels from Ireland to London, and then into the countryside and final to the Hague. The story is both painfully personal and also global, delving into moral questions about evil.

I recently listened to Eleanor Wachtel's May 2016 interview with O'Brien. O'Brien says she wonders if people such as the Bosnian war criminal, who is based on Radovan Karadzic, were always evil. "We ask that questions through time," she says, "but you never get an answer... Those who do these things have one thing in common, they deny. They believe they are the wronged one." O'Brien says, that "It's mad or it's a cunning so awful, that either way it's unpardonable." In the novel, Fidelma says to the accused, " I wish you were mad." It would make it easier for Fidelma to understand the atrocities committed if he were crazy. Ultimately, the novel offers no easy answers.


I also read and enjoyed O'Brien's memoir, Country Girl, her story of growing up in Ireland, and her experience of London in the 1960's. O'Brien's work was banned, burned and denounced when it was published because it often depicted young women who wished to flee their small towns and families, and because of their frank sexual longings. O'Brien herself was condemned for pursuing the kind of adventures her male contemporaries sought out. O'Brien writes brilliantly and the quality of her work has withstood these early barriers. Country Girl is an interesting testament to both the childhood she wishes to escape and the fascinating life she later lived.

In the stack of books I'm hoping to get into next is:
Helen Humphrey's The River
Kate Taylor's Serial Monogamies
and
Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing