Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite

Though Theodor Adorno once wrote, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” art is one of the few ways to express the inexpressible. In Makkai’s collection, Music for Wartime, characters deal with their collections to the Iron Guard and the Arrow Cross and the Holocaust, betrayal, through music and art and writing. Adorno’s comment goes right to the heart of the struggle to make sense of events when words fail. We usually think of art—paintings or music—as the highest expression of beauty in our culture. But paintings like “Guernica,” by Pablo Picasso, represent horror and shock in a way that no essay or novel or interview can. Not all the stories in Music for Wartime are completely harrowing, but Makkai doesn’t give her readers much of a chance to catch their breaths...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.