Early in Cathleen Schine’s poignant, very humorous novel, effervescent 93-year-old Mamie Künstler calls for that her grandson, Julian, drag himself away from the display screen of his cellphone. “I want your attention,” she proclaims. “I mean here you are.” And boy, is he. The 24-year-old has simply damaged up together with his girlfriend, can not afford his hire in Brooklyn and has been despatched by his dad and mom to Venice Beach, California, to take care of Mamie, who has fractured her wrist. Soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic arrives, trapping the pair collectively indefinitely in Künstlers in Paradise.
As a diversion from limitless hours of watching MSNBC “like hollow-eyed drug addicts,” Mamie begins to inform Julian tales of her life, starting together with her emigration from Vienna at age 12 together with her dad and mom and grandfather in 1939. The household delayed their departure for so long as potential, not often leaving the home throughout that point. As Mamie explains, storytelling is “what Grandfather and I did to amuse each other. We told stories when we were stuck in the house.” Once the household started their journey “off to a land of make-believe,” Mamie says, “I was amazed, enchanted! I was like Odysseus on Calypso’s island!”
Mamie’s tales of her adopted nation learn like a who’s-who of previous Hollywood: repeated encounters with Greta Garbo (who turns into an essential particular person in Mamie’s life), tennis classes with composer Arnold Schoenberg and Thanksgiving dinner with Aldous Huxley, actor Anita Loos and Adele Astaire (Fred’s older sister). Schine’s sharp wit is continually on show, as when Mamie interrupts her narration to touch upon Julian’s lack of familiarity with many of these celebrities: “We will have an intermission while you google.”
Few authors might pull off the storytelling format of Künstlers in Paradise, however Schine does so seamlessly and marvelously, making a multilayered saga about household dynamics and relationships, immigration, the early days of Hollywood and the customarily disturbingly cyclical nature of historical past. In addition to a cavalcade of humor, there’s nice and sobering substance amid the stark contrasts, conveyed in the slightest contact of Schine’s well-crafted prose: “The physical beauty of Venice and the moral ugliness of America were more difficult for Julian to reconcile. On the day George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by a police officer kneeling on his neck, the jacaranda trees burst into bloom, canopies of unnatural color, a spectacular purple, blossoms lush and bizarre.”
As story after story unfolds, Julian and Mamie are reworked. After Julian hears Mamie describe a Künstler household photograph taken again in Vienna, he notes, “She didn’t skip a beat at the mention of Dachau. . . . Or of her cousin who perished there. What an intricate, convoluted bundle of emotional strands she must carry around inside that heart.”
As Mamie concludes in her personal pleasant method, “I do not believe in life after death. . . . I sometimes have trouble believing in life before death: it is all so improbable.” Künstlers in Paradise is really a trove of surprising rewards.
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