My Review of Javier Cercas' Speed of Light

Excerpt:

"In Javier Cercas' previous novel, the affecting and widely honored "Soldiers of Salamis," a narrator named Javier Cercas chronicles his attempt to write a true story about a small episode in the Spanish Civil War. Through the recollections of an ensemble of Spaniards, Cercas returns to this episode often, wondering why a soldier of the Republic didn't report a Nationalist prisoner who had escaped from a mass execution. At the same time, a series of motifs recur, over and over, as if trying to attach themselves to some meaning about heroism or war or history, eventually finding it in Miralles, a veteran of many wars who transmutes what precedes him with an unexpected and heartbreaking coda. "

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/06/RVGIPPH28T1.DTL&type=books

John Adams' Dr. Atomic:

Towards the end of Dr. Atomic, as the detonation nears and most lie flat on the bare dark stage, there’s a dance. A few turns and one-two steps, a reproduction of hundreds of cabaret numbers.

The dance irritated me. I tried to think, remembering his Ligeti dance pieces, how Christopher Wheeldom would have choreographed this scene, and yet this distraction, which in restrospect seems futile and typical of workshop mentality, was not what irritated.

A congruence between subject and means of depiction need not to exist, at all really, for sometimes it is this disparity that shows us something new.

And yet, prompted perhaps by the silly dance number, I wondered what was the point of turning the atomic subject into an opera.

Not that opera has to have a point. Most operas do not, actually. They’re fluffers around pretty arias, although I guess that qualifies as having a point.

I want opera not to be the same staid maid. I therefore look forward to 20th century operas or new operas.

Somewhere Adams or Sellars or Rosenberg talk about Dr. Atomic and its Faustian undertones. And yet the Oppenheimer character is not a character but a mouth stuffed in a suit. Faust without Faust in not Faust.

What’s left?

Atomic talk, as well as some poems, set to music. Great music. Which rescued the piece from the beat of the kitsch stick (the maid doing a robot dance comes to mind). But not from being ponderous.

Is it enough?

Not for me. Sadly so.