Songs about the main ones: Swift's "formula" and Coelho's pleas for love

Paolo Coelho's sermon, Ilya Kabakov's verbal improvisations, Taylor Swift's secrets of success, and the cultural provocations of the radio airwaves. This month's books include high-profile novelties and much less hit, but extremely curious experimental works. Details - in the review of "Izvestia".

The Highest Gift

Paolo Coelho

A new book by Paolo Coelho came out in our country without pomp, without wide publicity, as if it were not an event at all. No, the event, of course, especially in the current realities. But it is a specific one. And perhaps it is really not worth attracting the attention of the mass public to it, in order to avoid disappointment. The fact that the author of "The Alchemist", "Eleven Minutes", "Veronica Decides to Die" and other hit novels, which in the noughties read literally everyone, this time acted in an unusual genre and wrote a sermon. Yes, yes, this is not a figurative expression, but quite a specific designation.

The book begins with the fact that Coelho tells about the performance of a young missionary Henry Drummond before the English believers in the late XIX century. He reads a biblical text - a fragment from St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians - and then comments on it until the end of the book, stating that the main thing is love.

Coelho's "The Highest Gift" was based on the work of the same name by Drummond, a real person. The Brazilian writer acted more as an interpreter, whose task was to present the essence of the missionary's ideas in an accessible, modern form.

There is no plot, no characters (except for the one already mentioned), nothing that we expect from fiction literature. And hardly such a booklet (about 120 pages, many of them half-empty or without text at all) could have been published in commercial circulation if its author had not been Coelho, but, for example, a simple priest. But Coelho has long ago achieved such a status that any thing under his name is doomed to public attention. And he takes advantage of it. The appearance of "The Highest Gift", of course, the whim of the maestro. But it was born from the best motives. And, perhaps, it is in these times that Coelho's words (seemingly naive and even obvious) can produce a healing effect.

Trialogues. Improvisations on free topics

Mikhail Epshtein, Iosif Bakshtein, Ilya Kabakov

In 1982, three friends - artist Ilya Kabakov, philosopher Mikhail Epshtein and art historian Iosif Bakshtein - undertook a creative experiment. They began to organize sessions of "trialogues". They chose a theme - for example, "Garbage," "Hockey," "Vacation" - and wrote essays sitting side by side, but without interfering with each other's work. The texts were then read out, and each person could write a comment on his or her comrade's work. The idea was to transform kitchen chatter into something more productive, not lacking in spontaneity but more focused.

In total, Kabakov, Epstein, and Bakstein had 14 "sessions" over the course of about a year. And further on, the list of participants expanded, the hobby went beyond a narrow circle, and the originators cooled down. With the exception of Epstein, who began to inculcate this tradition even in America, where he emigrated in 1990.

Today, Kabakov and Bakstein are no longer alive, although their names are even louder than when they were alive, especially the first of them. And so Epstein decided to publish the experiments of 40 years ago, accompanying the publication with a number of materials and testimonies that reflect on the "improvisations".

The supplements take up about half of the volume, and it still doesn't amount to much - 200-plus pages. But in this case the volume does not affect the value. Researchers of Kabakov's work will certainly not be able to pass by this work. As well as all those who are not indifferent to conceptualism and unofficial art of the USSR. But there is something valuable here for the widest audience, which may not even know who Kabakov is (let alone his friends). What we have before us is a collective verbal portrait of late-Soviet society and country. It is subjective, artificial, and strange, but it is also interesting.

Taylor Swift. Icon of world music

Katie Sprinkel

It is not surprising that in the West about the most popular singer of the planet - Taylor Swift - write books with enviable regularity. But the fact that the next such novel, created by Katy Sprinkel, very quickly (and legally) comes out in Russia, is remarkable. Another thing is whether we have a lot of devoted Swifties, Swift fans, ready to buy up everything that has at least something to do with their favorite artist?

Somehow it happens that here, although she's very famous, she's not particularly beloved: even if you take the period up to 2022, the zoomers were into Billie Eilish, millennials appreciated Lana Del Rey, Adele, Lady Gaga. And Swift - yes, they knew her, were interested in her as a showbiz phenomenon, but hardly listened to her on repeat. Nevertheless, some fans, of course, will gather. And they are unlikely to pass by this book - if only because there are a lot of excellent color photos and there are all sorts of curious facts like stories of creation of the main hits.

But let's be honest: from the point of view of the text, literary component, analysis of the phenomenon (no doubt, a major one and deserving a serious conversation) the book is very weak. It is quite small, 128 pages, many of which are taken up by full-size illustrations, and it is written in syrupy and enthusiastic language over-sweetened with compliments to the heroine, as if it were the work of a teenage fan rather than a professional researcher. Appreciate the phrase "years of hard work and perseverance have paid off," said in reference to 14-year-old Swift's signing to a label. By the way, she started singing at 10. Yes, such a long, thorny road!

Taylor appears here as a unicum, a genius, a saint, perfect. But, probably, those swifties want to read something like that: in this sense, we can talk about an exact hit in the target audience. Worse is another thing: although quotes from the artist herself in the book literally on every page (and, of course, their truthfulness and accuracy is not questioned), they are taken from interviews for the media, public appearances and posts Swift in social networks. Apparently, Sprinkle had no "access to the body". There are no conversations with associates of the star, her producers and other people. So what we have before us is not even a journalistic work, but a compilation of common knowledge. But - we repeat: the book will do for a collection of merch with the name of your favorite artist, and those who do not count themselves among her fans are unlikely to pay attention to such a thing.

Lost Sound. The forgotten art of radio narration

Jeff Porter

The series "History of Sound" of the publishing house "New Literary Review" is devoted to books about sound culture, and in its non-obvious manifestations. We have written about some examples before. In this series, a work on the history of radio looks both logical and unexpected at the same time. It would seem, where is the field for serious cultural and philosophical reflections? However, Jeff Porter considers this phenomenon not so much in the context of mass media, but as a new medium for artistic creation.

"In the first half of the twentieth century, radio broadcasting broadcast not only music, entertainment and news, but proved to be a meeting point for a multitude of experimental practices that blurred the boundaries between popular and elitist art," the abstract emphasizes. And the book does indeed reveal these lesser-known aspects.

Suffice it to say that the narrative begins with a description of John Cage's work for radio - the great avant-garde composer, known as the author of the work "4'33", which consists entirely of silence, in 1941 created a noise score for a radio play by the poet Kenneth Patchen. This is a rather obscure example. Unlike, for example, the story of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds: perhaps everyone knows that the idea of stylizing a play about the Martian invasion to match real news reports caused panic among the population - Americans thought they were really being attacked by aliens. Porter, however, finds an unexpected twist in this textbook episode. The biggest shock to the people, he argues, was the fact that radio could lie. This psychological blow was worse than if the aliens had actually engaged the Earthlings in battle.

Like the other books in the series, The Lost Sound touches on psychology, philosophy, history, literature, sociology, and as a whole, the result is an impressive picture of the "lost Troy" - an irrevocably gone great phenomenon that, alas, has as little to do with modern radio as ancient Greece has to do with a modern tourist country.