Waves & Tonics
by Tsipi Keller

Description

Leaving New York City behind, Karina, the narrator/protagonist, moves to a condominium in a small town in South Florida where she hopes to lead a quiet, idyllic existence of reading and writing. A pioneer in her mind, she is at first content to ride her bike, swim in the ocean, and dialogue with the birds, as well as with the friendly Hispanic laborers digging up the sidewalks in this newly developed neighborhood.  Keller writes all this in an open style of paragraphs much like stanzas of poetry—giving us more oxygen and the room to think.

Soon, though, she’s embroiled with her neighbors, one of whom professes that “I have to love you because you’re Jewish, my Lord and Savior was Jewish.”  Karina’s dream of “wandering lonely as a cloud” cannot remain exclusive of more direct and involved connections, though she ultimately need not embrace them.  She has carried herself down the eastern coast, carried all that is within her—all she has taken in from life and referenced or quoted writers not limited here to Walser, Aleichem, Markson, Borges [“Reality is under no obligation to be interesting”], Melville, the film “Kaspar Hauser” and a writer simply called “R.”  She carries all that in 2008 to the condo’s Meet & Greet.

The ensuing, messy reality—though under no obligation—does prove interesting and vividly relevant today.  Is there happy resolution to tumult?  Does a changed peacefulness emerge?  Here Keller quotes Kaspar Hauser on hearing music for the first time: “The music feels strong in my heart.  I feel so unexpectedly old.”  She parts from us with these lines:  “I, too, felt unexpectedly old, and I thought, this is what language does, this is why we live.”