Book Review: THE BROKEN ROAD (Book #3 of 3) by Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"One is only sometimes warned, when these processes begin, of their crucial importance: that certain poems, paintings, kinds of music, books, or ideas are going to change everything, or that one is going to fall in love or become friends for life; the many lengthening strands, in fact, which, plaited together, compose a lifetime... This journey was punctuated with these inaudible reports: daysprings veiled and epiphanies in plain clothes."

This third book in the trilogy was never completed nor polished the way the previous two books ("A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water") were, for Paddy Fermor died as the project neared completion. And what a project it was! The ambitious eighteen-year old's "Great Trudge" in 1933 was truly something only someone so young and idealistic would undertake: walk across Europe, from Holland all the way to Constantinople.

And here's the interesting thing: the book was published after he died as a 96-year-old, having accomplished so much more after his long walk. He became a war hero in World War II, and was the author of other delightful books, always a lover of all people from all cultures and faiths. Paddy speaks in this third and last volume with a voice so funny, so full of life, that it truly feels as if one was listening to a youthful Adonis in the prime of health and vigor.

I enjoyed this last book best of all the three. Always humorous, this one showed Fermor at his funniest, by far, and was also the one that seemed the least polished (although the sentences are still marvelously wrought). It also seemed the most realistic, somehow, because of the number of predicaments that he encountered, some of them life-threatening. I did wonder at how lucky and blessed he seemed in the previous two books, to encounter so few travelling headaches. In Book 3, he nearly lost life and limb, encountered a madman stalker, was threatened at knifepoint by a roommate, and nearly fell to his death as he scaled mountain ranges. Despite these events, the innocence of the times showed in the confusion and outrage he felt when he returned to a cafe, to find the bag he left behind had been stolen, or when some Bulgarian peasants charged him money for letting him travel in their wagons despite his obvious injury.

To read Fermor is to be his companion as he walks across mountains and plains, sleeping sometimes with less than savory characters (one of the funniest bits was when he innocently took shelter in a house of ill repute, thinking it was a clean inn!), sometimes amongst well-to-do pals.

I particularly enjoyed the last part, when he describes spending a night or two in seventeen (!!!) monasteries on Mount Athos, Greece. Despite the best of intentions of travelling every day, he would be "forced" to stay longer for one of two reasons: bad weather, but also endearingly, Fermor had the bad habit of reading Byron or Dostoevsky in bed until it was far too late in the day to travel safely.

What a beautiful series! And so fitting for year-end reveries. Fermor, after all, did all of this within a year.

He lived in one year more than many of us live in several decades. And this makes Fermor a must-read for everyone who wishes to drink deep of the sweet well of life's waters.

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Book Review: BETWEEN THE WOODS AND THE WATER (Book # 2 of 3) by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“It was a season of great delight; all seemed immeasurably old and at the same time brand new and totally unknown.”

I shall remember this book always for having a uniquely heartbreaking coda. After lavishly describing all the gorgeous places and people, in breathtaking detail, and ensuring that the readers have fallen in love as deeply as he did… Paddy breaks our hearts by telling us in the end that all that he had written of was now drowned in man-made dams. History and beauty wiped out en masse by economic demands.

“On Foot to Constantinople: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates” is volume two of Paddy Fermor’s “Great Trudge,” when, as a nineteen-year-old dropout, he sought meaning in life by going on an almost impossible trip: walking from Holland to Istanbul (which he determinedly called Constantinople.).

I read volume one (“A Time of Gifts”) a year ago, and it is not the sequence of events that stick to memory now, but an overwhelming impression of landscapes and vistas, leaving the reader a general feeling of mental refreshment without the physical punishment of actual travel. Book 2 echoes this feeling well.

There is also this bittersweet tang of nostalgia permeating both volumes, but especially pronounced in BTWATW.

For what can be sweeter to youth but to travel amongst beautiful new friends, and occasionally falling in love amidst the castles and plains of Hungary, Transylvania and Rumania (Fermor’s spelling)? The nostalgia is to be expected from a man writing this second volume in his seventies, of events half a century removed (he wrote Volume One only ten years earlier).

This second volume is less walkathon and more of “this is how my privileged friends” live, what with generous benefactors gifting horses (!!) and sponsoring car rides across Transylvania, with all manner of mischief known only by those privileged enough to afford these luxuries.

The best parts are the ones when Fermor is alone, walking through the Carpathian mountains and meeting gypsies and shepherds, sleeping under the stars and spying upon golden eagles and majestic deer. The wisdom of the elder merges with the sensual delight of the younger Fermor, and the result is page after page of luminous remembrances.

This delight makes Fermor an ideal vacation read, as each turn of the page is to be savored, passages read and reread for sheer pleasure.

Until he breaks your heart at the end. “Myths, lost voices, history and hearsay have all been put to rout, leaving nothing but this valley of the shadow.”

Nothing lasts, Fermor reminds us. So seize the memory of each day. Better yet, write them down. For all become lost, except when saved by resurrective words.


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Movie Review: MAESTRO

                                            (Movie poster borrowed off the Internet)

MAESTRO is a dragging mess of a few beautiful music-making scenes sprinkled with disjointed scenes showcasing skillful acting of two of the finest actors today.

The highs are truly high. No one can watch that Mahler scene in the cathedral and remain unmoved. “There is no hate in your heart,” Bernstein’s wife whispers in his ear after the performance, blessing and forgiving him for adultery done right in front of her, with lovers being brought in their home and introduced to their children. 

But the lows outnumber the highs.

Sadly, the overall message I got from the movie was that it was a defense for geniuses to spit in society’s rules, as if great gifts are any excuse for living beyond the pale.

It could have been so much more, indeed. There was no build up, no introduction of the main characters that mattered. It is as if the filmmakers assumed that the audiences already know who Bernstein is. We are told, not shown, that Bernstein and Felicia are talented individuals, but that Bernstein’s were by far the superior artistic gifts. The body language and smiles amid the chatter show the intimacy of lovers, but without giving the audience time to root for them. It’s almost a documentary in its quick succession of scenes and events. Fall in love. Raise a family. The challenge of infidelity. Sickness. Then Bernstein pulls through and cares for his ailing wife. As if caring for her at the end could make up for decades of sleeping around.

One of the last scenes shows Bernstein flirting with a man thirty? forty? years his junior in a disco club. And it struck this viewer as inexpressibly sad, especially when the end credits roll to the second movement of Chichester Psalms playing in the background and actual footage of the Maestro conducting near the end of his days. (By the way, don’t trust the Netflix captions! They said that at that point the overture of Candide starts playing, but no, it’s still Chichester.)

When we sang Chichester Psalms in college for Chorus class, what struck me was the purity of the soprano line (originally meant for a boy soprano, as there is no purer tone on earth as he sings “The Lord is my shepherd”) and how Bernstein’s infamous trademark leaps and minor sevenths seemed like someone reaching for heaven. And yes, there are parts in it that are truly of this earth (like when the male singers come roaring in, war-like, nearly shouting in the middle with “Why do the nations rage”), but then the boy soprano line returns and the choir echoes him, like souls who have lost their way but are ever straining to return to goodness. The sacred, and the profane. A fitting piece to end the film.

There are bits of the sacred in this movie, but sadly, the overall messaging belonged to the latter and not the former. 

I worry that the film will help Leonard Bernstein be remembered for the wrong reasons... or rather, for incomplete reasons. 

Book Review: THE METHOD - HOW THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LEARNED TO ACT by Isaac Butler

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"To theorize about acting is to theorize about what a human being is and how a human being works. It is to theorize about what good art is and how good art is made."

I did not expect that this 2022 book on the history of Method Acting would end up becoming one of my favorite reads this 2023, or for that matter, for all time.

If this was a play, then its spine (or supertask, to use the book's jargon) is simple enough. It tells the history of hallowed names in theater - those of Stanislavski, Strasberg, Adler, and Meisner - and how a cultural shift that began in Russia spread to America, and continues to impact how we view all acting in theater and film today.

To this reader, who experienced studying under different "theories" for different fields (in music, Kodaly and a smattering of Dalcroze ... in education, Montessori versus the traditional one... and in theater, the more traditional and strict style taught in universities versus the more easy-going, interior style in other workshops), the book was an utter revelation not merely of how impossible it is to safeguard a method against all other influences, but to what it says about human nature when people are passionately for or against one style of teaching as opposed to others.

Butler writes as a former actor does, infusing theory with practical examples that are nuggets of gold to any theater aficionado. He infuses cultural history writing with a dramatist's flair for conflict, making the historical figures come to life in a nonfiction book that was so exciting to read! It's quite possibly the best written nonfiction book I have ever read, never sacrificing academic rigor (the bibliography and notes alone took nearly half the volume) for artistry.

I put the book down with gratitude that it exists. It's a must-read for anyone teaching or involved in drama, for anyone who wants to give an intelligent response to the question "What IS good acting?"

But acting was never merely a form of entertainment.

Butler showed how actors, playwrights, in plays and films, crystallized and voiced the agonies of their current generation. Art as a mirror of its time. And thus, this fine book is more than the story of a pedagogical system. It is the story of humanity itself, and its struggle to overcome each decade's troubles.

And what about us humans, the audience of today? Butler writes:

"We live now in a Time of Performance. In this era, due in no small part to social media, we are more conscious than ever that we are performing for an audience of other people. We are also aware that we are the audience for everyone else’s performances, and we rate them, not with applause, but with hearts and thumbs-up, with emojis and retweets... it is unsettling to always be at least slightly aware that nothing is real, least of all ourselves... Today, the major challenge to an actor is not being heard, or seen, but seizing and holding an audience’s attention... Now acting and writing head instead toward clarity, worried that a surfeit of mystery and subtext risks committing the cardinal sin of art: boring the audience... This leads to the postmodern actor’s paradox: At a time when everything feels a little bit inauthentic, we crave simplified, clear acting that presents characters as coherent and easily knowable. We crave, in other words, a comforting lie about who we are."


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