In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jesi Bender’s novel Child of Light is a dark, magical, and inventive work of historical fiction.
Carole Maso wrote of the book:
“Jesi Bender’s Child of Light is an engrossing and enchanting work, following the thirteen year old Ambrette’s passage through a world both terrifically grounded and deeply mysterious. A sensual and attenuated reflection on the distances, on language and the ineffable, it is both ambitious and accessible, filled with an insatiable desire for something just out of reach. A melancholy, both romantic and mystical infuses the pages. A dark pleasure.”
In her own words, here is Jesi Bender’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Child of Light:
This novel is a work of experimental historical fiction that explores the tension between the pursuit for scientific advancement and the unending human interest in magic and myth. At its nexus is culture and art is the way we process what is happening around us. In Child of Light, a young female protagonist is placed at the heart of this back-and-forth between her father, who is an electrical engineer, and her mother, who is a spiritualist. It is only through paintings and poetry and music that she is able to understand her family and herself. The list below is eclectic and I think reflects both the classic Victorianness of Child of Light as well as its goth and punk ethos.
Spellbound – Siouxsie and the Banshees
“From the cradle bars / comes a beckoning voice / it sends you spinning”
This book is haunted. Its characters are haunted, often by experiences and qualities rooted in them from infancy. The idea of motherhood (gender as a tool for oppression as well as creation) is a central theme to this work as its original inspiration came from the Electra myth. I try to play with the idea of women who give birth as fractals of mother and child always expanding outward. I was also interested in the idea of something innately inside you that controls how you move through life, a sort of transfixed predestination, which married well with the theme of spiritualism and séance. Siouxsie summarizes it all up perfectly in this song.
Au Claire de La Lune
Childhood and the mother/child relationship is a steady current throughout the book. The family is also French; their last name is Memenon as both a play on the words ‘meme’ and ‘non’ as well as a nod towards Agamemnon. This old folk song is a traditional lullaby wherein the singer is imploring someone named Pierrot to lend them a pen so that they can write. But it is so dark that it’s hard to see and Pierrot basically tells the singer that he’s already in bed and to try the neighbor. It’s simple melody makes the ending all the more sinister when the lyrics end by saying that the neighbor tries to find a pen in the moonlight but “I don’t know what was found / but I do know that the door / shut itself on them”, presumably leaving them in complete darkness. The unsettling feeling that is so often evoked in fairy tales and childhood songs exemplifies the protagonist Ambrétte’s experience throughout the book. It also shares a similar title to the central piece of music in the novel, Debussy’s Clair de Lune.
Be Yr Mama – Sleater Kinney
“I made you better / You’re inside me / I’m yr mommy!”
I’ve listened to endless hours of Sleater Kinney, especially when I’m trying to think/writing. This song is great feminist response to the weird, psychosexual thing we do to women, making them mother-whores. The idea of being inside a woman as a child and as a lover becomes hazy. Since Child of Light is a queering, modern take on the Electra myth, the lyrics and sentiment of this song works well with the rejection of gendered expectations.
Another World – Anohni and the Johnsons
I chose this beautiful, plaintive song because it seems like an anthem for Spiritualists. Spiritualism became a major movement in the 1800s, especially across the ‘burned-over district’ of Central New York. Spiritualists believe that a person’s consciousness never dies and can continue interacting with the living. So, many of them didn’t fear death, because it was only corporeal. Ambrétte struggles throughout the book with learning to love the spirit and forgoing the physical world.
A Baby for Pree – Neutral Milk Hotel
The melody of this song is really beautiful but circular, which mimics the cycle of life. The titular Pree is a mother stuck in this loop of birth and babies and babies and babies. The surreality of this piece, coupled with its repetition, is both horror and happiness at once. In a short song, we hear about Pree’s breath and her breathing and she’s swallowing and coughing. Jeff Mangum chokes us on her motherhood and I feel claustrophobic.
Utica – Heathered Pearls
I have an obsession with Utica, NY and it is the primary setting for this story. Utica, now, is a depressed town but it is littered with memories of its former glory, including grand old Victorian homes, like the one that inspired the Memenon house. It is a big brick Romanesque Revival home sitting majestically on Genesee Street, among other beautiful, stately homes, now mainly turned into offices or apartment buildings. Heather Pearls created an atmospheric song for the city, and I’m not sure if he was inspired by the town in Upstate New York or by the ancient Phoenician one but I thought this song captured the feeling of being in a city of ghosts quite well.
Die Tonight – Ty Segall
If all art is about either sex or death, I definitely veer towards death. Even though this novel has more sex than anything else I’ve written, each act is still rooted in a death drive. Death is everywhere in this book; almost all of the characters seem acutely aware that they are actively in the processing of dying. Still, there’s some romance there.
Learning – Perfume Genius
Perfume Genius uses a simple piano melody with simple lyrics to amplify the horrors of childhood. Childhood abuse is so wicked because it can take a long time to realize that it is not love. Sung from the perspective of the abuser, he sings “But you will learn to mind me / And you will learn to survive me”, which mirrors how Ambrétte struggles between obeying her abusers and seeing a way out on her own.
L’appel du Vide – Spectral Park
L’appel du Vide translates from French to “the call of the void.” This means the urge to engage in destructive behaviors. An example would be the sudden urge to turn your wheel and drive off a bridge. The void is an absence, normally of yourself. For Spiritualists, this could be an absence of the body or of a material world. Voids in electrical engineering are flaws that results in errant charges. For Ambrétte, it is the echo of her own voice.
Claire de Lune – Claude DeBussy
If there is a lynchpin to this entire novel, it is this song. It is tied inextricably to the mother character; her longing, her creativity, her modernist leanings constantly at odds with her place in the world and in the family. Like Maman, this song is complex. It can be soft and sad, deep and textured, light and fading into the air. Inspired by Verlaine’s poem of the same name, it is the musical manifestation of these words:
Your soul is a chosen landscape
On which masks cast enchantment as they go,
Playing the lute, and dancing, and all but
Sad beneath their fantastical disguises.
Singing all the while, in the minor mode,
Of all-conquering love and life so kind to them
They do not seem to believe in their good fortune,
And their song mingles with the moonlight,
With the calm moonlight, sad and lovely,
Which makes the birds dream in the trees,
And the plumes of the fountains weep in ecstasy,
The tall, slender jets of water among the marble sculptures.
Jesi Bender is an artist from Upstate New York.
Her work leans towards experimental historical fiction that interrogates the tension between language’s utility & malleability.