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The following is a short story review. Enjoy!
“The Timpanist of the Berlin
Philharmonic, 1942” (The Best of Kim
Stanley Robinson, Night Shade Books, 2010) exists entirely within a single
performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler on
April 19, 1942 in honor of Adolf Hitler’s birthday the following day. You can go onto YouTube and find this
concert. It was filmed for propaganda
purposes and it’s an almost physical shock to see the swastika banners, the
bland-faced Nazi celebrities appropriating the music’s prestige for their own
the way they might a Jew-owned Rembrandt, the way the camera lingers over
handsome young soldiers who have gladly sacrificed an eye or a limb to the
glory of their genocidal cause. The
footage raises uncomfortable questions about the relationship between art and
power and to what degree the one is corrupted by the other. This particular rendition of the Ninth,
moreover, is masterful. Critics consider
it one of the greatest interpretations ever performed. It is full of fury and violence, echoing the
times and war in which it takes place, and is clearly a statement on its
times. But what is being said?
The event
demands explication.
Kim Stanley
Robinson’s story is both a careful establishment of the context for this
concert (it was a command performance, and one which Furtwangler had been
ducking for years) and a close reading of the emotional text of the
interpretation – exactly what Furtwangler meant by it – as mediated by an
ordinary man who happens to be the orchestra’s timpanist.
Line by
line, paragraph by page, Robinson has never written better than here.
That said,
it must be mentioned that “The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, 1942” is
not by any reading a work of science fiction or fantasy.
However, a
perceptive reader will easily tell that this is a mainstream story written by a
writer forged in genre. For a very long
time the consensus model for non-genre fiction (but there are signs that this
may be changing) has been one where the events serve to illuminate the inner
life of its main character. Not so
here. The timpanist is a perfectly
convincing creation, but he is also, except for his profession, one whose
character is neither central to the story nor revealed by its end. Rather, Robinson uses events to make a larger
statement – about art, about history, about culture. You can decide on the specifics for
yourself. It is a work of art that looks
outward, rather than inward.
Were this
science fiction, it would be easily one of the best SF stories of its
year. As it stands, it is simply one of
the best stories of its year.
Need I say period? Very well, then. Period.
This review first appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction and is copyright 2014 by Michael Swanwick.
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Thank you for this--it's a story I'd have likely otherwise missed. This, and the earlier review of Andy Duncan's are much appreciated.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read it, but should do so.
ReplyDeleteKim Stanley Robinson's 'A Short History of the 20th Century, with illustrations' is one of the ten or so short stories that form the foundation of my personal literary world, and it too is not SF - and yet somehow it's entirely right that it comes from the hand of an SF writer.