Shanghai Sojourn

BVMW Duchamp continuedfrom previous page provisatory style." But rather than writing a literary analog to a cadenza, which would presumably entail a "brilliantissimo./WgAr offancy," Cohen chooses to conflate musical performance with the literary. And so the novel opens with Laster, a violinist presumably performing a violin concerto by his friend and mentor, Schneidermann, at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in December 2002, addressing the audience in a shapeless 380page monologue instead ofperforming the expected cadenza on his violin. Or at least that's what Laster says he's doing. If Laster is to be believed, as he continues speaking the conductor walks off, and, then, one by one, members of the orchestra pack up and leave, followed by some (though by no means all) of the audience (which includes many of his ex-wives, children, grandchildren, therapists, and other personal acquaintances). Although Laster does not lose his voice after hours of talking, he does piss in his pants twice, and the venue's management as well as police, firefighters, and the media show up. In short, the concerto is upstaged and silenced by the soloist. Laster, though, claims his "cadenza" is a "PR stunt" for the concerto. Men, Laster says, are his "rivals," women his "object." Of Schneidermann, Laster declares: he prevented me from becoming a creator ..., Schneidermann he had frustrated my own composing, my own compositions ..., indeed any output and above all any input I had and offered whatsoever about his own art was what Schneidermann he frustrated, nullified and so that Schneidermann, that he forced me into becoming an interpreter.... Cohen chooses to conflate musical performance with the literary. The tension between interpretation and creativity thrums through the novel. Schneidermann is the composer and creator, Laster the interpreter and (as he repeatedly says) hack. "I'm full of rage, true," Laster says. "I'm genius and worthless, true. I'm an interpreter as much as a memorizer, true." His position as soloist—he boasts of refusing to play "ensemble" music— makes him a star who rides in limos, wears handmade alligator shoes, lives at the Grand (where Schneidermann apparently had a piano-bar gig for awhile), and enjoys sex with countless women (students, especially). Schneidermann , by contrast, dresses in rags and is dismissed as unsuitable for janitorial work when he shows up to apply for a teaching position at "the Conservatory of Conservatories" (where Laster was fired for raping a student). Since a dominant theme of the novel is the destruction of high culture in Western civilization—"no one knows what's good and what's not anymore"—when Laster claims that "the most debilitating institution in the history ofall art" is "the trend Viotti birthed"—virtuosi touring—he is effectively blaming the institution of which he, a touring virtuoso, had until that evening been a member in good standing. Laster's monologue purports to be a eulogy for Schneidermann. Repeatedly (and repetitiously), he prods the wound of Schneidermann's disappearance from the cinema where he and Laster were watching a matinee showing of Steven Spielberg's Schindler 's List (1993), which Schneidermann, who performed for Schindler and later survivedAuschwitz, despises. The story of their last matinee date sounds plausible at first, but the more often Laster recounts it and the longer he rants, the more his anecdotes and assertions pile up contradiction on contradiction. Consider, for instance, Laster's most extravagant and entertaining tale, narrating Schneidermann's discovery of masturbation and the awakening of his creativity while lying under a rubber tree in the home of his "nine musical aunts," practicing violin fingerings on its trunk. Laster tells the tale in the first person until, without warning, he shifts to third person mid-tale. (The longer he talks, the more often he oscillates between first and third person when relating Schneidermann's experiences.) Schneidermann as an adult, Laster elsewhere notes, practices piano fingerings (as at Auschwitz, on the arm of a fellow inmate); it is Laster himself who is most likely to practice violin fingerings. Laster claims that Schneidermann was "10, or 1 1 , or 12 years old" at the time and that it happened during the last Passover his family spent together...