Music for Wartime

Starred review from June 15, 2015
Doublings and parallels distinguish the 17 exceptionally well-told stories in Makkai's (The Hundred-Year House) outstanding debut story collection. In "November Story," a producer for a reality-based television program manipulates its participants into a romantic relationship even as she herself is manipulated in her relationship with her partner. In "Painted Ocean, Painted Ship," an English professor who teaches her pupils Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" experiences a poetically appropriate streak of misfortunes in her career and personal life when she herself accidentally kills an albatross. In "The Briefcase," a political refugee who assumes the identity of an imprisoned professor so thoroughly immerses himself in the man's life that he refuses to accept that he is not the professor when the professor's wife exposes his deception. The structural balance and order of these doublings contrast with the emotional lives of Makkai's characters, whose tenderly wrought frailties and inconsistencies make them seem all the more fallibly humanâa quality beautifully showcased in "The Worst You Ever Feel," in which a young violinist of Romanian descent realizes that he has been made to travel with his father's aging mentor, who suffered under Nazi oppression, as compensation for his father's flight to freedom in America. Though these stories alternate in time between WWII and the present day, they all are set, as described in the story "Exposition," within "the borders of the human heart"âa terrain that their author maps uncommonly well.

July 1, 2015
Makkai follows her two novels, The Borrower (2011) and The Hundred-Year House (2014), with a collection of 17 nuanced short stories that examine conflicts internal and external involving the touchstones of family, artistry, and identity. In the notable The Worst You Will Ever Feel, Aaron's family hosts famed violinist Radelescu, who taught Aaron's father in 1941 Romania. As Radelescu's harrowing past is revealed, young Aaron discovers an uncomfortable truth about his father. In Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart, Makkai brings together a local Chicago actor who suffered a breakdown on stage and his friend, the narrator, who is determined to provide Peter with a chance at redemption. In Cross, cellist Celine, now staunchly single after a failed marriage, is taken aback when a homemade, increasingly oppressive memorial appears on her lawn just as she is trying to pull together a new quartet. Melanie struggles with unexpected revelations following her fiance's death in The Museum of the Dearly Departed. With diverse settings, Makkai's tales offer rich explorations of the key questions and struggles that are part and parcel of the human experience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2015

Makkai triumphed with her first two novels (including The Borrower, starring a librarian), and she's been anthologized four times in The Best American Short Stories. All of which bodes well for this collection. The stories can't be easily pigeonholed--in one, a reality show producer gets two contestants to fall in love, while in another, a composer records the folk songs in a village that's about to be destroyed. But they promise to be heartfelt.

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