"In "Duet for Past and Future," inspired by Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," Reubenfine, a lawyer in Indianapolis, having lost his musical career (along with his wife and child), thinks he recognizes the very cello he had sold to finance his legal education and new life. He and the young woman who plays that cello become involved in a relationship that threatens to tie them together for a moment or forever."--BOOK JACKET. "In "A Man of Sorrows and Acquainted with Grief," inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Passion According to St. John," Kraft, an exiled New Yorker and a Jew, is the conductor of a high school orchestra in a small Texas town. He talks his way out of a traffic ticket by telling the born-again state trooper of his own special relationship with Jesus; Kraft tells the credulous lawman that the reason he exceeded the speed limit was that he'd been carried away by Bach's "Passion" on the car radio. The resulting comic - and serious - imbroglio turns Kraft's life upside down."--BOOK JACKET. "In the title story, inspired by another poem by Robert Frost, a dying stage director and his new Russian-born wife, who has acute but temporary arthritis, are confined to a sickroom from which only one of them will ultimately emerge (alive). Determined to escape their fate, if only for one perfect spring day, they make a comic and touching game of weighing their mutual and personal woes."--BOOK JACKET.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In some respects, Stern is a writer's writer: his impeccably crafted stories gracefully incorporate literary references and demonstrate a reverence for language and the arts. As in two previous volumes (Twice Told Tales and Twice Upon a Time), these seven short fictions "reflect the inspiring passions and concepts" of specific poems and stories by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Borges and Yeats. Each of these middle-aged protagonists is a Jewish New Yorker, though some live in exile (in the Midwest, the South, etc.) from the culture that sustained them in Manhattan. Several have been divorced, but their second wives are valiant and compassionate; a mentor who has died is another recurrent motif. The central component of three stories is classical music. In "A Man of Sorrow and Acquainted with Grief," Jewish high school music teacher Ben Kraft, picked up for speeding on a Texas highway, lies to the trooper that he was carried away by the spiritual message of Bach's St. John Passion blaring on his tape deck, and then is horrified when he's celebrated in the community as a born-again Christian. Jerry Reubenfine in "Duet for Past and Future" mourns his youth; he thinks that the cellist in a chamber music concert in Indianapolis is playing the instrument he sold in Manhattan when he quit being a poor musician and went to law school. An out-of-work stockbroker in "The Taste of Pennies" is anguished because an injury to his mouth keeps him from playing the clarinet, the source of his spiritual sustenance. The characters in every story have found life more complex than they had ever imagined; among their many losses, they particularly rue their loss of faith in the future. The protagonist of the title story has run out of time; dying of cancer, he convinces his new wife, herself suffering from a painful arthritis-like virus, that they should both leave bed and spend one perfect day in Manhattan together. While the plot here is rather far-fetched, it catches the sadness of diminished expectations with exquisite poignancy. The remaining three stories are weaker, but the collection as a whole offers rewarding insights, as the characters deal with life's disappointments with quiet resilience. Stern's gentle epiphanies double the resonance of the texts that inspired him. Agent, Georges Borchardt. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
The reverence with which Stern treats the work of his predecessors is a rarity in the current anticanonical climate, and these tales are often ebullient praise for the necessity of fictions in our lives. -- The New York Times Book Review, Emily Barton
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
stern tells it twice again,
By aegean5 "aegean5" (houston, tx) - See all my reviews
This review is from: One Day's Perfect Weather: More Twice Told Tales (Hardcover)
Daniel Stern has done it again with this next volume of his "twice told tales," re-visitations of poems and stories and symphonies which he manages to transform into gorgeous fictions. These are not mere dramatizations; they are full metamorphoses. In a hilarious example, the story "A Man of Sorrows and Acquainted with Grief," Stern uses Bach's THE PASSION ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN to leap into, of all things, small-town born-again Christian Texas...as seen from the point-of-view of a Jewish high-school orchestra director who gets pulled over for speeding on the interstate. The stories also "riff" off of Robert Frost poems, Wallace Stevens' "The Man on the Dump", W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming" and even Borges. These are stylish and smart, always moving and masterfully composed. Bravo, Stern!
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