“Brother of Sleep” should know more about music
Having searched the web for any deep discussion of the book “Schlafes Bruder”, by Austrian author Robert Schneider, and having found none, I shall philosophize one myself.
A friend recommended me this novelette, mostly because of one chapter that describes a 2-hour-long organ recital. He read it in the original in German, but I had to read the English translation, which is well-done, with good use of vocabulary.
(The only thing wrong with the translation is a punctuation detail: dashes which should be separated by spaces on both sides – such as these – are notated without the spaces-like this. I would criticize this oversight as amateurish, however, the truth is, the translator is a good professional who knows what they are doing, shining in spite of this detail.)
At first the writing style (and now I think I am talking about the author, not the translator) took a bit of getting used to – I felt it didn’t flow, sentences and paragraphs were too long –, but at the end I felt no difficulty with it. I probably got used to it, but I never thought it was as beautiful as others felt.
I wanted to read the story of a musician suffering in the ways a typical talented artist not blessed by money or a healthy environment… would actually suffer. (For instance, the search for an actually good teacher in one’s town.) Unfortunately, such a realist story remains to be written. What we have here is a weird flavor of fantastic realism, also known as magic realism.
I do think the promises the author makes in the first chapters are inconsistent with the weird choices actually made during the story. There is a tiny little bit of expectation management, clearly insufficient. One can be forgiven for feeling as a comedy the beginning of the book; however by the end one is sure a tragedy is intended.
Also, instead of creating a philosophical dialogue, the author just takes the reader through a strange ride in which each chapter almost deals with just a single aspect of the story. Because the author is constantly changing the subject (even if we stay in the same place), he can say whatever he wants, but there’s no setup, no progress and no payoff, most of the time. It changes subjects so much that it reads like a picaresque novel – albeit one that stays in the same village!
For instance, this is supposed to be a love story among other things, but we are robbed of a proper romance. The love exists earlier than humanly possible – it is just there. It is never developed because the lover never gets to know the darling, or such details are never provided. The author seems to risk that the reader won’t take the love seriously – he certainly expects me to feel the love as tragic without deigning to write any dialogue.
Another example: I wanted a story about the protagonist and those close to him, but the characters are shallow, many parts of the story are summarily told rather than shown, and the author will go off on a tangent about random unimportant characters as he pleases. One instance of this is right at the beginning: an egotistical midwife who makes the mother suffer during delivery, which hints at a theme that is never brought back. It might have been relevant if Elias, the protagonist, had become an orphan. As it stands, it is just a torture scene that I endured without any payoff. The nurse is out of the story, never returns. Following the midwife’s thoughts set the tone for something entirely different: a realist story, which this isn’t. The author lied to me. Also, contrast how detailed this side character’s thoughts are, compared to almost non-existent thoughts of more important characters.
Sexual and scatological details are scattered over the story like oregano, most of which were not essential and just made me doubt the taste of the author – I am not a prude, but it just seemed out of place, like a misguided attempt at (only superficial) realism.
For instance, women in the village are interested in the child protagonist’s penis. In my experience the number of women who are honestly interested in penises is extremely low. Maybe the author is the one with a definite interest in cocks. This detail has no payoff at all, it just goes away and nothing happens, and most of the ideas in the story follow the same destiny.
Certain choices seem random. For example, the mother is at first just “Seff’s wife”. Notice when her name finally appears and tell me why the author chose to inform us only then. I don’t know the reason, since at that time we don’t get closer to her. And later she becomes just “Seff’s wife” again. Why is this story being told in such a haphazard way? Didn’t anyone edit this book?
Once I understood better what kind of book this was, it still left me desiring a more rational story with setups and payoffs. I’ll give you one example, after which this review will enter spoiler territory. The protagonist is born with yellow eyes. There is absolutely no reason for this. He was different enough from everyone else to be treated differently, no need for yellow eyes on top of everything else.
Finally, I will say that the descriptions in this book were a very good attempt, but in my opinion still fall short of good ones.
Some spoilers below this line, but not much, not really.
Speaking as a composer myself, I can tell you, the protagonist’s superhuman hearing is not realistic for anyone who ever mixed any music. This is not hearing anymore, it’s an entirely separate sense. First of all, the intensity of the sounds described varies immensely, and the author does not account for masking. If you could hear 30 trees in the wind as if you were close to each one, you already would not be able to hear anything else, much less the blood vessels of distant creatures. The trees would already have created white noise, which masks any signal of equal intensity. If we think about his hearing we cannot place it. What is different in him? His timpani, his cochlea, his brain, his outer ear, what? So the genre is fantasy rather than science fiction. If the author knows about psychoacoustics, it does not show.
Another important criticism: since this is about a great composer, superhuman hearing is entirely irrelevant. No point in making music that only Superman can detect. Music composition needs human hearing, not superhuman. Remember, the most important composer in the classical repertoire was deaf. There is never any payoff to Elias’ super-hearing; falling in love with someone’s remote heartbeat seems to me as brutish as a passion for their round butt.
Perhaps the super hearing thing comes from a common misunderstanding of the art of composition. In remote centuries music was defined as “the art of creating emotion through sound”; a better definition arose in the XXth Century simplifying that to just “the art of sound”. But this again seems slightly erroneous to me, I think music is truly “the art of symbols conveyed through sound”. Bach, universally accepted as the best composer of all, is a great example due to the abstraction level – his music is great due to its symbols, the relations between the voices, not its sound. Sound itself was so insignificant to Bach’s music that it can be played in any instrument or group. This is why we can say Bach did not write well for the voice – he treated the voice like any instrument. A soprano, a violin, an oboe, whatever, they’re the same thing.
Classical music is the music that evolved the techniques required to tell long, abstract stories through sound. (The other musics didn’t.) This is why classical music demands one’s attention – miss 2 minutes of a symphony and I am sure you don’t know what is going on anymore. Debussy would disagree, but that’s because he was the first to invent his own personal way of telling abstract stories through sound. He hated being called an impressionist composer, insisting he was a symbolist.
But at the start of the 21st Century we are unfortunately in the era of music as simply some sound – timbre is the only parameter of sound that common people understand. Before hip-hop the common people required melodies; now people have become so barbaric that they only demand drums – simpleton repetitive drums, not sophisticated ones. Even the bastard art of film music, which once was rich with symbols, now is just filling the background, forbidden from calling attention to itself, by filmmakers who don’t realize the power of music. (All great film soundtracks call attention to themselves.) Well, when civilization existed, of the 4 parameters of sound (and maybe there are many more), timbre was always the least important and the most superficial. Now it’s as if timbre were all that existed. People hear only the surface, they don’t even know that symbols are possible.
In classical music, timbre was the last realm to be conquered. In current pop music, timbre is the only element that is perceived. Even the perception of rhythm is numb. The marketing guys have designed the descent of pop music such that a transition to traditional music becomes impossible.
Anyway, back to the book, it seems to me what gave Elias the extra hearing was contact with a stone in the lake - reminiscent of “2001”. But the narrator keeps talking about God’s gift… Come on, give the aliens their due! (However, religiosity is part of the tragedy of this village.)
As a classical music nerd I can attest one can be treated differently his whole life without being a basso profondo child, too. But at least being a bass enabled our supermusician to sing anything in any octave. Again, none of this has anything to do with the art of music composition.
Also totally absurd is the idea that a composer can develop without a teacher, without lessons, without books, without examples, without listening to great music – in short, without a healthy environment. In music we stand on the shoulders of giants as much as in any other field. Maybe the story is touching to some people, but it is only glorifying the idea of raw talent, which I am sure, is the wrong approach to understanding geniuses. Nearly every genius composer that existed was deeply immersed in music from childhood. Most composers now regarded as geniuses only became themselves after a life inside music, writing huge quantities of unimportant works. Brahms burned more music than he published. Beethoven wrote dozens of alternatives for sections of the Ninth. Rest assured, if we didn’t have the second half of Mozart’s compositions, we wouldn’t be talking so much about him today. Every composer’s fifth symphony is much better than her first. Masterpieces generally come from old composers as they get progressively better; Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorák, Wagner, Ravel, Debussy, Rachmaninoff are great examples, while Schumann, Chopin, Stravinsky and maybe John Williams are exceptions – but these never became worse either, they just had trouble becoming even better than the geniuses they already were when young.
A realistic story would need alternate realities to show the difference in our talented composer, first with proper training and environment, and then tragically without it. The tragedy would not be a lack of recognition as in this novel, it would be the undeveloped potential. This is the real story that needs to be told, since it is what really happens.
Why is this important? Well, in music there exists an underworld, comprised of guys who think they are geniuses and therefore MUST NOT learn music, lest their singular originality be harmed by education. They are proud of playing like they play without ever having had a lesson. They are proud of not knowing how to read music (which in reality is super simple), not having studied harmony, composition etc. Clint Eastwood is proud of composing the music for his films, when in reality he just hummed some melodic fragments to some great orchestrator. Needless to say, most of these people are deluded about their own accomplishments. And today they think they can educate themselves online, they have no idea of the importance of a music teacher. I don’t think there is any other domain in which ignorance can be so conflated with talent. Unfortunately this book is just another instance of this kind of thinking.
Finally, the perfunctory, impersonal way of telling events does not lead to the sensation of a living, breathing village. A better village needs repetition with occasional change, so try one of the Don Camillo books by Giovanni Guareschi – those are full of lively dialogue, too.
Because “Brother of Sleep” provides only an unrealistic world view, and because it isn’t terribly entertaining to read, I would recommend a pass, as long as you have something better to read. But if it means you’ll turn on the TV or the computer, then reading the novel is better.