As the prospects for opera diminish (at least anywhere near Santa Barbara), one's mind naturally turns to summer reading. For the start of the extracurricular reading season, I cannot recommend Daniel Handler's Watch Your Mouth enthusiastically enough.Watch Your Mouth is a novel in which the narrator, Joe, relates the plot of his life as an opera. The tragi-comedy of his relationship with Cyn (a.k.a. Cynthia) after his junoir year in college is followed by his description of the 12-step program that he adopts to free himself from the damage. Both Joe's experience as the lead tenor in a darkly comic tragedy and his efforts to move through the 12-step recovery process are uproariously funny and thick with references to literary, operatic, and personal growth traditions.
Handler's prose is scintillating. He manages to weave seamlessly the self-consciousness of operatic drama with the self-consciousness of the narrator's search for escape from his theatrical fate. This skillful storytelling even includes directions for the orchestra and vocalists, choreography, stage design and direction, and leitmotifs. It will warm the hearts of opera lovers, and it shows us that opera itself is a wonderful vehicle for depicting the trials of a dysfunctinal family (which we probably knew anyway--thank you, Wagner).Give Handler a try, although beware, Gentle Reader--it is opera with the taboo sex and not just the suggestion of it.
2 comments:
Sure, don't credit the recommender or anything like that. :) Handler also wrote the screenplay for the movie Rick, starring Bill Pullman, which is based on the story of Rigoletto (Rick O'Lette is a corporate flunky in Manhattan with a sleazy boss named Duke). Not quite as...anarchic as Watch Your Mouth, though you don't want to get Handler's answer to "La donna e mobile" stuck in your head.
Wow, I didn't know about the film. I will have to check it out. And, for the record, Boris did recommend Watch Your Mouth :). I never would have found it without him.
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