Limbo: A Memoir (review)

214Fourth Genre Limbo: A Memoir by A. Manette Ansay WiUiam Morrow, 2001 269 pages, hardcover, $25 Although she has written four critically acclaimed novels, among them Vinegar Hill and Midnight Champagne, A. Manette Ansay didn't set out to be a novelist. Her vocation was music, and she trained—hard—as a concert pianist from childhood through her sophomore year at the prestigious Peabody Institute. ForAnsay, playing the piano was prayer. More than prayer, music was life and expression, a connection with God: "Music gave voice to everything I wasn't permitted to feel and think and say. When I finished playing , I'd simply close the lid and walk away. I considered myself His instrument . I claimed none of that joyful noise as my own." This book is the story of becoming an artist, of devoting herself to one art only to have an undiagnosed iUness "topple" her out ofthat longed-for life. It is the story of becoming an artist all over again, giving voice to the forbidden through words instead of music. It is also the story of being formed by place, of discovering that not only stories, but also the "self" emanate from the landscape. Ansay believes that "there is a relationship, much like that between parent and chüd, between the physical, or external, landscape we caU home and the spiritual, or internal, landscape that becomes the human soul."The landscape ofAnsay's home, ruralWisconsin, is a landscape that she finds secure, ordinary, tight, and limited. Her home is a place that leaves you with no questions, with its "perfectly rectangular" houses, lots, and farms, and with "streets mapped out at right angles." It is a place "precise as stained glass." And that is what Ansay expects to find in fife. As she grows, becomes exposed to books and ideas that lend glimpses of life's mysteries, uncertainties, and secrets, Ansay takes refuge in music. As she learns that lesson that aU artists must embrace—that a shift in point of view transforms everything—her first reaction is often fear. One such moment is when Ansay reads The Chosen, in isolation and in secret. Reading this book is an epiphany—there are other realities and words can capture them. But the book also triggers an old fear of loss. Reading of a character's struggle to reconcile philosophy and inteUect with religious faith, she has a powerful moment ofrecognition: the "fear I'd been raised with, one that occupied a powerful cornerstone ofmy consciousness. To lose your faith was worse . . . than anything, even death." The book haunts her enough that she even thinks ofit while playing the piano, "where Book Reviews215 usuaUy, nothing could distract me."An epiphany intermingles with her fear: "I understood, for the first time, what literature could be: an opportunity to five beyond yourself, to be bigger and brighter than you'd ever hoped to be. To see your face reflected back, framed within a broader context. To stare at that reflection, and begin to dream." Reading has the power to propel one beyond the place that forms—and also inhibits—the self. Ansay glimpses that power in words and stories in dafly fife too, in the way her mother's storyteUing becomes transformed by place. As her mother drives Ansay out of town to a distant piano lesson Ansay notes that when they are in famiUar territory, the stories emanate from the place itself, focusing on events that occurred in the places they pass, or the people who Uve in the particular houses. But when they drive through new territories, Ansay observes that her "mother's gaze shifted inward." As she teUs stories of the past she brings that past to life: "She took me along with her and her sisters,"Ansay writes. Mother and daughter enter the past as ifit were a place you could reach by car. In attributing such power to words, Ansay is in the company ofVirginia Woolf, a kinship she recognizes by opening with an epigraph from "A Sketch of the Past": "It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. . . ." That's a line fromWoolfs own memoir, from a passage...