Book: Künstlers In Paradise,
Author: Cathleen Schine,
Published by: Henry Holt and Co.,
Price: ₹ 599
“How would he ever capture this world, this clash of histories, in a script set in the future? The future, his own to make up, seemed barren and stilted compared to this vital past.” Julian Künstler’s thoughts echo the sentiments of the reader as she delves into the intergenerational trauma and the legacy of the Künstlers in Cathleen Schine’s twelfth novel.
Julian Künstler is a lost case for his parents — as he wanders from one interest to another. His roommate leaves him for Law school, the Brooklyn bookstore where he works shuts down, and his girlfriend dumps him. As a last resort, he is packed off to Venice in California to take care of his feisty ninety-three-year-old grandmother, Mamie Künstler, and her laconic housekeeper, Agatha. A short trip that would help him find himself (as his parents fervently hope) transforms into a prolonged exile with Covid-19 changing the world at large with frightened masses, uncertain and in relentless pain. The ignominy of the pandemic prompts Mamie to share her poignant stories as an émigré in America. Her grandson learns to be an able listener, jotting down in his Moleskine notebook, hoping to unpack the silences in a script.
Like many other Jewish families, Mamie had arrived in sunny California along with her parents and grandfather being one of the “lucky” few to escape Nazi persecution in Vienna. In German, ‘Künstler’ means ‘artist’ and Mamie’s life stories offer an erratic and talented world of performers, movie stars, writers, musicians and families in cadence with the many notes of her cherished violin. Enigmatic personalities like Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann, and others mark dissonance in Mamie’s chequered life, much like the compositions of her beloved mentor, Arnold Schoenberg. The most important lesson for Julian is the crucial significance of storytelling in mundane lives racked by ennui, disorientation, and anger.
Schine is adept at interweaving the absurdities of familial connections and memories with a dash of humour in tantalisingly delectable prose. At one point, exasperated by his ineffectual existence during the lockdown, Julian goes outside to smoke a joint. Schine offers a sardonic reminder: “No stores were open, it was hard to find flour, there were riots and rioting police, but you could have weed delivered.”
The arduous task of finding a home in the Venice of California, far away from beautiful Vienna, a home fraught with betrayal and death, epitomises deep-rooted alienation and abject loneliness, as forlorn and sullen as the out-of-place woollen jackets and smelly cigars belonging to Mamie’s grandfather. Incongruities are an integral part of the past and the present, and Julian finds it increasingly difficult to make peace with such a world: “On the day George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by a police officer kneeling on his neck, the jacaranda trees burst into bloom, canopies of unnatural color, a spectacular purple, blossoms lush and bizarre.” Balking at his existence, as useless as “white people who raged uselessly on Twitter”, Julian must delve deeper into America’s soul by listening to his grandma’s tales of the enterprising Irving Tabor, an African-American from Louisiana and the chauffeur and confidant of the developer, Abbot Kinney, the man who envisioned the community of Venice in California. Articulating pain in a dextrous language from the past, Mamie insists that #BlackLivesMatter across all dimensions of oppression.
As the pandemic world unmasks vaccines, love, desire, and newfound goals under the orange tree in Mamie’s backyard in sync with jingling martinis, both Julian and Mamie realise: “Stories recorded not history but what had settled, like tea leaves, in her mind.”
In his Nobel lecture in 1982, Gabriel García Márquez had shared: “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.” In 2023, Schine’s book — a multigenerational saga — peeks into such solitude, with warmth, humour and resilience.
