Books in Brief
A playful imagining of Mozart and the women in his life

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Imagine a Jane Austen novel about a family with four daughters to marry off.

Relocate it to Manheim, Germany, in 1777. Garnish it with cups of hot chocolate dusted with cinnamon, platters of rich pastries, music and youthful ardor galore. If you are lucky you might arrive at something as delectable as "Marrying Mozart" by Stephanie Cowell, a former opera singer and National Book Award winner for an earlier novel about young Will Shakespeare, "The Players."

Cowell has had the bright idea of filling in the incomplete historical details which exist about the Weber clan, a German family led by a sweet, impractical musician, Fridolin Weber, and his chronically dissatisfied wife, Maria Caecilia.

Fridolin hosts vivacious salons in his humble home for fellow musicians, and on one occasion the gifted, sensitive composer Wolfgang Mozart and his protective mother attend.

"Marrying Mozart" by Stephanie Cowell Viking, $24.95

As a young man in his 20s, Mozart's life will intersect with the four Weber daughters in numerous ways. He will become their boarder; the ardent suitor of the prettiest and most musically talented one, Aloysia; the object of her sister Josefa's love; a surrogate big brother to Sophie (the youngest); and, eventually, the eager husband of the spirited Constanze.

Cowell fills her fictionalized account of these cross-wired relationships with sensuous descriptions of food, places, musical and sexual awakenings. While employing facts and actual letters to tell this many-branched story, she also credibly invents a great deal.

But the documented financial riskiness of the artistic life in 18th century Europe comes through clearly, as do the obstacles facing spirited young women who lack social status and money. And the characters are well defined, particularly the sensitive, impetuous, hard-working Mozart, the mercurial and manipulative Maria Caecilia, and the charmingly sincere Constanze (who for centuries got a bad rap from scholars who considered her "unworthy" of Mozart.)

It's fun to compare Wolfgang's amply detailed surviving letters with Cowell's version of events. There are also many musical cues to pick up on here, indications of what Mozart was composing and listening to at the time. (It's suggested, with some justification, that the Weber girls inspired a number of his finest female arias. )

But "Marrying Mozart" is as much about the difficult, colorful lot of the Webers as it is about the brilliant musician who married into the clan. Their story makes a grand little mini-opera, filled with twists of affection, musical politics, love, loss and chocolate.

— Misha Berson

Boys will be boys, and sometimes that's a dangerous thing to be. That's one of the lessons of Brad Land's unsettling memoir, "Goat."

Land grew up in small-town South Carolina, doing what adolescent males do in small towns: drinking beer, trying to have sex and looking for a way out. One evening, just before he was about to start his second year in college — having flunked out of one college, he was about to enroll in a small liberal-arts school in his hometown — he left a beer-sodden party and was accosted by a couple of strangers who asked him for a ride. They beat him mercilessly and stole his car.

He suffered not only from his injuries, which included a ruptured eardrum, but also from the taunts of guys who were sure they wouldn't have let themselves get beaten up. While Land was recuperating, his younger brother enrolled in Clemson University, where he pledged Kappa Sigma fraternity. So Brad decided to go to Clemson and join the same fraternity. But he entered a hell of stupid, drunken, sadistic hazing that brought back echoes of the earlier beating.

"Goat: A Memoir" by Brad Land Random House, $22.95

Land quit the fraternity and — after the death of a fellow member of his pledge class — Clemson as well. Later, he somehow made his way to the University of North Carolina and Western Michigan University, where he studied creative writing, apparently to good effect. "Goat" is a bleak and often horrifying little book, written with a novelist's finesse.

Memoirs are almost always full of tiny details and precise dialogue that even the most retentive of memories would never dredge up, and "Goat" is no exception in its evident fictionalizing. But if it's not truthful, it's true: an unsparing book about the awful things people do to fill the sad emptiness of their lives.

— Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News

"Referred Pain," the title novella in a new collection of short stories by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, is about as pleasant as a trip to the dentist. This is to be expected, since the tale is about how a man's life changes after he inadvertently bites down hard on an olive pit and breaks a tooth.

"Referred Pain and Other Stories" by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Counterpoint, $24

The incident precipitates a series of harrowing oral surgeries, which author Schwartz recounts in the kind of detail for which she has earned a reputation in such earlier works as "Leaving Brooklyn" and "Ruined by Reading." For reasons that aren't entirely clear, the protagonist embraces his ordeal as an homage to the suffering his immigrant parents endured in a German concentration camp.

Other stories in this collection conjure up less disturbing imagery. Several investigate the unusual fantasies of seemingly conventional folk: "Hostages of Fortune" follows a married couple's years-long pretense of raising two children who actually are only figments of their imaginations; in "The Trip to Halawa Valley," a divorced couple reunites in Hawaii for the marriage of their son and reverts to their old habit of detailing the blisses of vacations never actually taken; and "Heat" deals with a woman's belated play for a terminally ill man on whom she long has entertained a crush.

Other stories such as "Intrusions," "By a Dimming Light," and "The Word" contemplate the act and the implications of writing.

There are a few recurring themes in this collection, but taken altogether the stories don't present any kind of cohesive chorus. The prevailing mood is one of authorial detachment.

An exception can be found in "Francesca." For this story, Schwartz has crafted an exquisite conundrum concerning a biology professor, his work, his student translator and a former lover. It is not pain but sharp poignancy that distinguishes this work.

— Barbara Lloyd McMichael

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company