In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
James Elkins’s novel Stories, Like Illnesses is truly uniquely told and a mesmerizing treatise on memory and self.
In his own words, here is James Elkins’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Stories, Like Illnesses:
This is a wonderful site. I love the difference between authors who have favorite songs on deep background, giving them the feeling of their life, and authors who play particular songs in their head while they write, or the difference between authors who cite songs in their writing, and authors who hide them. My work is an outlier in all this, because it centers on music, and there’s music in the book—actual sheet music, which can be played or just seen on the page. That’s not to say I don’t have a playlist in my mind, and my book has references to some of those tracks—Dylan’s My Back Pages, the Grateful Dead’s Ripple—but the music in the novel is very different.
The book is the story of a person who’s undergoing a crisis. He keeps a diary of his year. At the end it’s all too much for him, and something happens (I won’t say what). Then, forty years later, we meet him again, aged over ninety. He has just been down in the basement and rediscovered his notes from that year. He reads them, hoping to relive his past—but he fails to remember much of anything that’s in the notebooks. He’s forgotten places, events, and even people. But as he reads, he realizes that he has taken the feelings he had for those people and places, and found them again in the music he plays on the piano. He has been living alone, playing the piano for forty years, and he sees that some of the music he plays lets him relive the emotions of the past without remembering the particulars or even the people.
He sets out to write notes to describe what he’s discovered. The book Stories, Like Illnesses has notes at the end, written by the elderly narrator. In different sections, he retells the stories of the book as music. His notes create a parallel text, a second text, in which the stories you’ve read in the book are retold as music. The older narrator says this is true portraiture, very exact in its emotions, not distracted by the actual people and events. It’s my attempt at a new kind of storytelling.
The composers and pieces I mention here are all real, but none of the music is theirs. It’s reminiscent of the original composers’ pieces, but it’s changed, because it’s the way the character remembers the music. That’s why I don’t have a Spotify list: you can go and find the original pieces, but they aren’t the ones in the book. These videos are the only place to hear the music that is printed in the book, and played, in my imagination, by the old narrator.
1. Like all five of these, the first video is only an excerpt of the pages where the narrator talks about Rosie, a woman he had an affair with forty years earlier. The place she had in his mind was taken by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. The narrator talks about Martinu’s lovely naïve music, which is very simple, but tends to evaporate, like Rosie evaporated from the narrator’s life.
2. Nikolai Medtner was a conservative Russian composer, a friend of Rachmaninoff. The narrator associates his melodies with perfect midsummer days in his very distant youth. He grew up in Watkins Glen, New York, and had a briefly idyllic childhood that he now rehearses by playing passages of similar simple happiness in Medtner.
3. Catherine was the narrator’s co-worker when he had a job in Guelph, Ontario, before his crisis set in. She was prickly and aggressive. The narrator associates her with Leo Ornstein, a wild modernist composer. Like the others, the piece here, called Suicide in an Airplane, is a real one, which however only exists in fragments in Samuel’s mind.
4. Iannis Xenakis is a favorite of listeners who like experimental postwar music. He was a mathematician, and composed pieces far beyond the capacity of most performers. This excerpt is about a piece called Mists, which asks pianists to play at several different speeds simultaneously. It reminds the narrator of his life during the year of his crisis, when many voices impinged on him and tore his attention in different directions. The music here begins like the real Mists, but most is my own composition.
5. Anton Webern was Schönberg’s most important student. As the narrator says, he composed very short pieces because he was trying to compress the excesses of old-fashioned music like Beethoven or Brahms. He didn’t trust what they wrote; he needed music to be purged of sloppy emotions. The narrator is reminded of Webern when he reads a chapter of his old notebooks describing how he had once tried to understand his own family by comparing them to the parts of a microscope. If he only managed his microscope properly, he thought, he could control everyone’s emotions. The comparison, Webern to microscope parts, is meant to conjure the hopelessness of containing emotion.
I hope these are interesting. They’re only small windows onto the novel, but large windows beyond the novel and back to the original composers.
also at Largehearted Boy:
James Elkins’s playlist for his novel Weak in Comparison to Dreams
James Elkins is Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an art historian and critic as well as a recognized authority on the experimental use of images in works by W.H. Sebald and Anne Carson to Claudia Rankine and Teju Cole. Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York and for the last twenty years he has lived, studied, and taught in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of several books on fine art and photography which focus on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature.