Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet and Weekend in Mustara (review)

Desperate scholars are featured in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet and Weekend in Mustara (two novellas), by Curt Leviant. In the first novella, Dr. Gantz, travelling in Budapest, Hungary, meets a survivor, Ferdinand Friedmann. Friedmann claims he is in possession of the "original music" for the Hebrew alphabet, presumably some pre-rabbinic aboriginal trope. Gantz, a musicologist desperate for a definitive publication to secure his tenure bid, bites. But Friedmann is cagey, and along with his partner, Ferenc Furer, keeps Gantz on a hook but refuses to reel him in. The local Hungarian university professors consider the pair to be Swiftian loonies who are also bent on processing used coffee grounds into usable paper and other such schemes. Gantz is repeatedly tantalized by bits from Friedmann's unpublished papers on the find, plus snatches of song from Friedmann's rich voice. As we follow the quest from Gantz's point of view, we realize, along with Gantz, that this is crazy, that we are obsessed, and that the Friedmann-Furer pair is no better.

"Weekend in Mustara" has Leviant himself as an enthusiast for the poetry and relics of eleventh-century poet Yehuda Halevi. A mystical bond between Leviant and Halevi has occurred because each penned the exact same quatrain a millenium apart. Mustara is a xenophobic village under a repressive political regime, situated halfway between sea and sky. It is populated by a loose amalgam of Muslims, Slavs, Italians, and others, and supports a small population of Jews. The narrator has arrived too late for an exhibition of materia poetica and other things in the local Jewish museum. In his search for relevant and fulfulling relics, he is thwarted first by the Jewish Sabbath, then by the sanctioned and enforced Sunday closings. Meanwhile, an estranged relative of an aging quartet of Jewish sisters steals a precious clay pitcher and attempts to vend it to the narrator. There are chases, confusions, apprehensions, a trial, a conviction, and an execution. But by that point the narration has been pointedly and purposely convoluted, the living confused with the dead, the convicted replaced by the innocent, and the clarity—if it was ever really there to begin with—replaced by muddled assertions.

Into what arenas are readers sent? This is a sort of quest literature, like Eco's The Name of the Rose, wherein the object is a missing section of Aristotle's Poetics, namely a treatise on comedy to complement Aristotle's definitive writing on tragedy. Whether, in these two novellas, the narrator is on the trail of original manuscripts or of original music, one must ask: what would the fulfillment of the quest achieve? Leviant's processing of readers through these stories reveals a penchant for Zen-like narrative, a project of refocusing readers on the journey, rather than the arrival. The frustration of the narrators only deepens. One is not, however, given any epiphany. In Peter Mattheissen's The Snow Leopard, the writer returns to his spiritual master after an arduous trek among the Himalayan peaks. The master asks his pupil, "Did you see the snow leopard?" Matthiessen answers, "No: isn't that wonderful?" Leviant does not provide any similar such realization for his characters. They remain frustrated, and each novella's denouement has the reader searching, as though lost on an unfamiliar freeway, for useful exit signs.

As both of these stories contain searches for original evidence and relevant cultural ties to earlier Judaism, what is Leviant saying? It's hard to know. Characters who fail to find what they seek end up saying more about loss than about fulfillment. Leviant's work, in these instances, reveals a writer so enamored of an idea that he has forgotten a crucial element: making the reader care. The tales are written artfully and contain the kind of richness of detail...