Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Sunday June 20, 2010
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ILLYRIA
Elizabeth Hand
Viking
ISBN 978 0 670 01212 1
135 pages
$15.99
Reviewed by Lloyd Rose
True fans of Elizabeth Hand may have already read "Illyria," which was published in Britain in 2007 and won a World Fantasy Award. Her best-known previous novel in this country is "Mortal Love," a lush blending of fairy lore, madness, art theory and romance. The heart and end of that book was loss. The romanticized beauty of fairyland -- which can make poorer fantasy novels so icky -- proved to be a lure and a trap, not unreal, exactly, but heartbreakingly unattainable.
After "Mortal Love," Hand published "Generation Loss," whose portrayal of gritty suffering is as strong as its fantastical elements. And now "Illyria" can be seen as a coda to both these books: Adolescence gives way to middle age, and magic to the ordinary. It's called growing up.
Madeline and Rogan, cousins in a 1970s Hudson Valley town, are two halves of one soul, perfect lovers who tryst beneath the porch of an old mansion, a true underworld, "dim and cool and smelling of earth and old paint" and peopled with garden gnomes that remind Madeline of grave monuments. In winter, they find a secret lovers' hideaway in the attic and discover a toy theater with curtains and scenery and tiny burning footlights. Glittering fake snow falls behind the little proscenium. There are no actors, though. And mysteriously, the toy is too large to fit through the opening into the attic.
This miniature theater, which Hand wisely never explains, represents the heightened excitement of adolescent love and the hope of carrying that romance into the real world. Madeline and Rogan audition for their high school's production of "Twelfth Night" and are cast, but not (as Madeline had dreamed) as the twins Viola and Sebastian. Instead, Rogan is given the role of the melancholy clown-singer Feste, revealing a beautiful voice to go with his fairy-prince good looks.
That glitch in Madeline's fantasy is the first crack in her and Rogan's enchanted world. Others follow. Hand refuses to have things explode in fine, sorrowful catastrophe. Instead, our hero and heroine's petty human limitations and weaknesses wear them down to mortal size. At the end, the toy theater finally has figures on its stage, and the cousins' reaction is meant to be comfort enough, for them and for the reader. It has to be; it's all that's left.
Lloyd Rose is a former chief theater critic for The Washington Post.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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LEONARDO'S LEGACY: How Da Vinci Reimagined the World
Stefan Klein. Translated from the German by Shelley Frisch
Da Capo
ISBN 978-0-306-81825-7
291 pages
$26
Reviewed by Michael Sims
Leonardo da Vinci has so long been sanctified that it's easy to forget he was human. Fortunately, Stefan Klein paints a fresh portrait rather than further gilding an already blinding lily.
Leonardo the artist and inventor are here, of course, but Klein devotes his most enthusiastic attention to Leonardo the naturalist. He wants to know how his subject saw the world with such a new vision. Klein analyzes how a Renaissance painter could have invented the "exploded view" of body parts and machines, his translucent outer structures revealing inner connections. He explores how Leonardo's gift for analogy in his voluminous writings parallels his comparison of organs and tendons to machine parts.
To do so, Klein interviews the eccentric hobbyists and scholars who actually build Leonardo's flying machines, and he even visits the likely sites of Leonardo's (conjectural) test flights. Klein consults engineers about the ingenious water clock. He hikes the terrain that Leonardo explored. Klein's vivid journeys on Leonardo's trail help create a sense of the man behind the red chalk self-portraits and also make for enjoyable travel writing.
"His notebooks are full of reflections," writes Klein, "inspired by details other people would likely deem insignificant and ignore." Leonardo's perception of nature was astonishing, especially for its time. For instance, he described precisely how a dragonfly's wings move, and he sketched water flows not visible to the normal mortal eye. He dissected bodies far beyond any need to portray them in paintings. Leonardo even painted the first known landscape that lacks a symbolic message. "Driven by curiosity," Klein adds, "he worked for the sheer pleasure of understanding the world."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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