Cormac James’s novel Trondheim is a profound examination of motherhood and relationships.
“Extraordinary and meticulous. . . . An X-ray picture of the subcutaneous breaks and sprains in a rocky relationship.”
You can’t be your own therapist, dice can’t shake themselves, and at the desk you can’t always dig yourself out of a mental hole. But you can go to the kitchen and make another sandwich and press play. Play (the fun kind or not) is exactly what you need, even if that’s not what the button actually says. It’s just an arrow, pointing right. Where it’s really pointing is: somewhere else—which is where you want your thoughts (sometimes your whole mindset) to go. That is music’s great gift to a writer. Each song is its own family, climate, culture, but none of those things exist independently of your own confrontation with them. What you’re really confronted with is distance and difference, and all the mental and emotional work needed to narrow that. The moment can be deeply disruptive, in a positive way. For me, writing Trondheim, each of the following songs was model, permission, catalyst, encouragement.
Lauren O’Connell, “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner”
What does a cover version do to the original? What does a new version of a story do to those that preceded it? The starting point for Trondheim was something that happened to friends of mine. Their 20-year old son was on a student exchange year in Norway, and one day they got a call from an ICU there: he’d been found dead in the street, his heart had been revived with CPR, but now he was in a coma, come quick. I interviewed all of the main actors of the “original” story, hoping to use their accounts as guardrails alongside the probable-possible axis I’d use to build my own narrative. Between one account and the next, the variation—in both focus and effect—was huge. That didn’t narrow possibilities but opened them up. The best cover versions do likewise. Here, Lauren O’Connell’s washed-out performance of “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” leaves all overstated emotion at the door, shows that restraint can be as charged as any vocal pyrotechnics, and helps us to hear the muted melancholy in the original.
Seán Ó Sé, “Do Bhí Bean Uasal (Carrickfergus)”
Some stories come with a legacy that’s baked right in. Take the Irish folk classic, “Carrickfergus.” Its melody has been traced to an 18th-century Gaelic song, “Do Bhí Bean Uasal” [There Was a Noblewoman], but its lyrics are of scattered origin. The version we now sing is probably a splicing of “modern” English lines with several older songs, which range from plaintive (the sea is wide and I cannot swim over) to archaic (with gold and silver I did support her) to pathetic (I’m drunk today and I’m seldom sober). The impression of a deep fault running right through the song’s heart only adds to its power. I applied a similar structuring principle to Trondheim. Two perspectives, juxtaposed. Multiple registers of emotion, value systems, personal context—not just contrasting but clammed. Here is an oldish recording from the great traditional singer Seán Ó Sé, who alternates between Gaelic and English, between the song’s modern and older lyrics. The effect is not competition but complement. Not dissonance but multiplicity. The gaps don’t diminish the song’s reach, punch or precision, rather open up a sense of enormous possibility.
Claire Diterzi, “L’Odalisque”
Let’s put it politely: in the anglophone world, French pop and rock don’t have the very best reputation. The algorithms rarely throw up anything to endanger such an opinion. But stare long enough at a stopped clock and it will eventually tell the right time. Live long enough in any country and you’ll eventually hear a jewel like “L’Odalisque.” If anyone in an English-speaking country put out the like, there’d be a rout of admiration. It’s a showcase for the ferocious talents and theatricality of Claire Diterzi, fusing elements of Japanese diction, Balkan vocalization and harmonies, and pop inflections the B-52s would have been proud of. And in that fusion is something I particularly appreciate: a tension between allegiances which drives rather than drags. It’s something I tried to emulate in Trondheim, where at one point a main character thinks: Every family is its own climate. They might easily have added: and its own geography—meaning each character’s own origin story and the allegiances that implicitly involves. The two main characters are Irish and Catalan. Their children are French, as is the home they’re building for themselves. The hospital in Norway, though, is an entirely distinct space, party to no particular alliance. Like Diterzi’s song, it’s not a space that neutralizes difference, but one where those tensions can be most fully and savagely expressed.
Thomas Konër, “Permafrost”
Music, visuals, narrative: I like work that plays a long game—deploying processes which are not registered consciously, but pursued far below the surface, barely felt. Exhibit A: Thomas Konër’s ambient compositions, whose pacing and orchestration seem of a mode more attuned to climate or geology than anything willful. (I also share his affinity for all things polar: Trondheim is set in the depth of winter, just south of the Arctic circle; my previous novel, The Surfacing, was set on an ice-bound ship far north of it.) His progressions feel both calm and stealthy, gentle but oppressive, measured but irreversible. Whenever I listen to one of his extended pieces, it’s only a matter of time before I’m suddenly—and repeatedly— jerked back into the present, as though jolting awake from a light nap. The effect is a disturbing mental rush, from where I thought I was to where I actually am. Konër’s project is: from there to here. His question is: how? I hope Trondheim learned something from him.
Frequent Distance, “Creepy Cello”
Just as some films are more compelling with the sound turned down, some music has a canny knack of conjuring up its own visual counterpart: almost impossible not to hear it as the soundtrack to a complex visual narrative. “Creepy Cello” (like much of Frequent Distance’s work, available on SoundCloud) is one of those: it seems to be waiting for Claire Dennis or Mati Diop or Lynne Ramsay to make the images that should accompany it. In the meantime, you can close your eyes and see them for yourself.
Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind, “The Shining (Main Title)”
I worked on Trondheim during a three month residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. Enclosing an enormous central courtyard, its huge 18th century building has served at different times as college, seminary, hospital. Each floor of each wing has a long central corridor, giving onto a dozen rooms on each side. The center is mainly for Irish artists, but my stay coincided with the hard lockdown of early 2021, during which those living in Ireland couldn’t travel, so for a while I was the only resident artist. When I needed a break from the keyboard, I would wander the vast upper stories alone. It was The Shining. The first flakes of snow began to fall outside, like the petals of fruit trees in spring. What it the start of something or the end? Eventually two more artists arrived and we became friends. As we walked the endless, empty corridors, we used to hum Kubrick’s dreadful opening tune.
Bracco, “Be A Boy”
My friend Loren is half of the French post-punk/techno duo Bracco. I met him while doing a residency in Paris (see above). I was working on Trondheim and he was working on their latest album, Dromonia. In the evenings, sometimes I’d walk down to his studio at the far end of the courtyard for a listen. The album’s first single, “Be A Boy,” is an urgent delusion. It begins with a female voice (Claire Dance) singing: “I dreamed that I was a boy…”—which chimes strangely well with the scenario which structures Trondheim: a multiplicity of female characters converging on the coma-bound son who, as the novel’s dead center, acts as an aspirant vortex of fear and fantasy.
Gavin Bryars, “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet”
You overhear someone saying: It shouldn’t work, but it does. Are they talking about an outfit? a recipe? a novel? a song? a relationship? Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” owns the category. A scrap of song recorded from a homeless man, looped and orchestrated almost ad infinitum. This version (by no means the longest) clocks in at 27 minutes. It should be boring, but commands attention. It should be exhausting, but is invigorating. One of the structuring principles of Trondheim is repetition. Similar things happening over and over again. Characters caught in a medicalized limbo that serves as a huit clos. As they watch the same traumatic procedure being performed repeatedly, each protagonist’s perspective evolves in its own direction at its own pace. As we get older, we become more ourselves, Mary Gaitskill says. Reiteration might be expected to progressively drain an event/riff/motif of meaning, but the opposite is the case. In “Jesus’ Blood,” the insistent repetitions convey something of the power of opposing adversity with blind tenacity. I hope Trondheim does something similar.