Buena Vista Social Club/ Buena Vista Social Club (1997) So fun and the group has won many accolades. My favorite track is “El Carretero.”

Llegaron Los Camperos!: Nati Cano’s Mariachi Los Camperos/Nati Cano’s Mariachi los Camperos (2005) This album is so beautiful that it makes my heart ache! The strings are vibrant, the guitars macho, the soloists soar, and it is a fiesta. I especially like “Las ciudades – Cities.”

Last week I reviewed “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” by Louis de Bernieres and felt that it was tedious, brilliant, and ended in a completely different fashion than I would have finished it. The story was beautiful, but there were flaws that left me dissatisfied. This week I will share a book that tells nearly the same story, but leaves me with a feeling of completeness and healing, despite the fact that the book will never be finished by the author. This book is “Suite Française” by Irène Némirovsky/

Némirovsky, a Jew was born in Ukraine and educated at the Sorbonne. She and her family fled Russia to Paris to elude the Nazis in the early 1940’s where she wrote two of a planned five stories that would make up “Suite Française.” Unfortunately, .she and her family were arrested and deported to Auschwitz in 1942 where she died in the camp. Her young daughters hid this manuscript and brought it out 65 years later to be published.

“Suite Française” is set in France from 1940-1941 with the first story, “A Storm in June” telling of the mass exodus of Paris at the time of the Nazi invasion and the second story, “Dolce” relating the experiences of a small provincial farming community that is occupied by German troops.
The story of “A Storm in June” is darkly humorous, telling how the lives of several characters become intertwined. There are those who feel they are above all the riff raff who must deal with the new reality of shortages, lines, ration cards, the inability to work, drive, or carry on their old lives. These uppercrust elitists get their just rewards in some very surprising ways.
The story line of “Dolce” is quite similar to that of “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” by Louis de Bernieres in that there are always similarities when a country is invaded and occupied by the soldiers of another country. The soldiers become part of the community, filling the places of the young men who left their own homes to fight a war and are now in prison camps. Wives and girlfriends are left behind and find themselves having to rely on their own fortitude to run the farm, take care of their families and deal with the occupiers. As in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” a soldier who was a musician in real life is an officer in charge of men, and billeted in the home of a young woman. This young woman is married instead of affianced, but Lucile in France is very much like Pelagia from Greece in that she is not in love with her philandering husband. Lucile’s mother-in-law loves her son deeply and feels that Lucile is a betrayer to her marriage just by enjoying life while her son Gaston is suffering. Lucile and Pelagia are both strong and though they fall in love with their occupier soldiers, they both choose to wait until after the war to act on their love.
Némirovsky manages to make the same points as de Bernieres without the tedious blocks of narrative relating history in enormous words, epistles that become dark and gloomy, or the mad ravings of a dictator on the verge of collapse. Everything I found disagreeable in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” was turned right in “Suite Française.” The characters still exhibited all the best and worst of people in a time of war and suffered the consequences, without resorting to long passages devoted to battle, deprivation, physical abuse or vulgarity. I still felt the impact of the idiocy of war without the dread and disgust I felt while reading “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.” Némirovsky gave me the opportunity to see all the ugliness without dragging me right down into fox holes and without shouldering a rifle myself.
I recommend “Suite Française” to anyone wishing to read of the second world war without walking away muddied and bloodied.

The internet allows us to be whomever we wish to present to the world. I could say I’m an older woman from the United States who sits in a recliner with a black cat on my lap and really be a Bulgarian man with a pit bull who is a bouncer for an after hours bar. You don’t know me. I can post a picture of some roses, or an ice cream cone bank, or a candle lit for peace, or a cartoon lady and use them as my avatars and you would be left to create a picture of who you think I am in your mind. You don’t know the real picture of me. I could post reviews of classical music and good literature and esoteric films that I’d copied from somewhere else on the net and really be interested in heavy metal, graphic novels and porn, because you don’t know me. I could be any or all of those things because the internet lets us create an image and wear a mask. I could really be…

I had heard of Luna, the ancient redwood tree scheduled for logging and Julia Butterfly sitting in her from news reports. It was a delight to read of her triumph in saving this tree and its home. I wish that we will save more of the elders before money loving corporate raiders fell them all and turn the remaining vibrant, but endangered forest ecosystems into tree farms.

“Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” is de Bernieres’ fourth novel and is set on the Greek Island of Cephalonia during the Italian and German occupation in World War II. It was one of the most tedious books I’ve read in months, but now that I’ve finished, I appreciate the tiresome bits (not that I wish to duplicate the experience). Each chapter us written in the voice of one of the several dozen characters and range from the Italian Captain Corelli who uses music as a metaphor for everything to Iannis, a doctor and amateur historian who specializes (as Drousola says) in writing words that are a page in length. It is a story of love, war, despair, cruelty, compassion, redemption, miracle, and unthinkable acts being committed in the name of politics.

The story itself is beautifully tragic and I am coming to hate war even more than I thought possible. There are so many disagreeable bits that the peaceful ending seemed to be too little, too late. I realize that de Bernieres merely wrote what his characters had to say, but it got quite tedious to read the diatribes of Mussolini, the interminable sermons by Father Arsenious, the descriptions of the graphic battle scenes by Carlo and Mandras, and especially the history of Cephallonia by Dr. Iannis. Maybe some people can just skim these parts, but it is my lot in life to read every word (heaven helped me get through The Lord of the Rings twice) and now that I’m older and have put my foot down, I cannot read a word of which I am unsure without looking it up. There were actually more words to look up in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” than in my recently reviewed “Descent of Man” by T.C. Boyle.

It is a good thing that I have read this tale, but I am glad to be passing the book on to another reader so I won’t be tempted to go back and reread it.

Across America/Art Garfunkel (1997) Okay, I admit that despite Paul Simon’s apparent success, I have always been in love with Art Garfunkel. “April, Come She Will” is one of my favorite tracks.

April in Paris/Count Basie & His Orchestra (1955) I really love the big band sound and Count Basie is a must have in any music library. Of course I chose this album at this time because of the rich tones of “April in Paris,” but the whole album is a delight.

Vivaldi: the Four Seasons/Janine Jansen (2005) This is a timeless tribute to my favorite Vivaldi.

John McCutcheon’s Four Seasons: Springsongs/John McCutcheon (1999) Folk/rock music with fiddles and guitars, it is really fun and it makes my toe tap and my mouth grinning. I’ve never heard “Fever” in such an interesting manner.