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| FICTION |
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Mohr
by Frederick Reuss
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| Published: |
2006 |
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| Pages: |
312 |
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| Publisher: |
Unbridled Books |
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Links:
Washington Post profile
Unbridled Books reading guide
SF Chronicle review
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“Reuss elegantly probes how separation turns to loneliness, and the ways people try to start their lives over, all the while
animating a strangely quiet Germany and a chaotic Shanghai.”
Review
In the years before World War II, 30,000 Jewish immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany landed in — of all places — Shanghai. One of these was author, playwright, and doctor Max Mohr, who left behind his non-Jewish wife, Kathe, and his daughter.
Mohr promised to send for them once his embryonic medical practice was established. But he never did.
Frederick Reuss' novel Mohr starts where the historical records on the man leave off. In a series of connected vignettes, beginning with Mohr's tearful
departure for Shanghai and then following the separate lives of the doctor and his wife, Reuss tries to understand why the
doctor let his separation from his spouse become permanent. In Shanghai, Mohr pursues a nurse who works at a nearby hospital,
but the budding romance is complicated when the Japanese invade and a policeman begins to suspect that Mohr is somehow collaborating with them. Back in Germany, as the realities of anti-Semitism
and her personal abandonment become too much to ignore, Kathe begins to contemplate a move to Shanghai of her own.
The two lead characters plod forward uncertainly: Mohr tries to live his life in Shanghai as the adventure he always wanted
to have, but he's held back by memories of home and China's alien culture; Kathe assuages her loneliness by telling her daughter
stories about her husband, but she's quietly overcome by pain. Reuss elegantly probes how separation turns to loneliness,
and the ways in which people try to start their lives over, all the while animating a strangely quiet Germany and a chaotic
Shanghai.
In a move that won him favorable a comparison to W.G. Sebald, Reuss has placed within the text 47 photographs either of or by Mohr, which he discovered while researching the novel. Mute
testaments to the reality that the author is trying to imagine, the photos continually provide a counterpoint to the story.
In one, we see Mohr in a starched white shirt and big glasses, gazing uncertainly into the camera. He looks so unlike a man
who would abandon his wife half a world away, but so like a man who's frustrated in his search for a new life in a strange
land.
- Scott Esposito
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“While Niemeyer's designs from the '30s were boxy modernist structures, by the early '50s, the buildings began to soar.”
Review
With his affection for curved lines and fluid forms, Oscar Niemeyer was an outsider in the modern architects' club. An admirer
and colleague of Le Corbusier in the '30s, Niemeyer ultimately rejected the severity of the International style for more sensual forms. His curvilinear buildings, inspired by the lush landscape of his native Brazil, earned playful derision
from the likes of Walter Gropius, who called Niemeyer a "tropical bird of paradise." But the architect's site-specific approach to modernism generated a unique,
Brazilian style, most visible in large-scale projects such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói and his designs for Brasília.
Although Niemeyer's public projects attracted international attention, Alan Hess' intelligent monograph argues that the architect's
plans for private homes are equally important manifestations of his ideas. Describing each residence in detail — displaying
floor plans, sketches, anecdotes, and enticing photographs by Alan Weintraub — Hess charts the evolution of Niemeyer's designs, from modernist rigidity to sweeping, sculptural statements. Spanning 1936
to 2005, this survey rarely leaves the tropical landscape of Brazil, as all but two of Niemeyer's residential designs were
built in his homeland.
Hess shows that, while Niemeyer's designs from the '30s were boxy modernist structures, by the early '50s, the buildings began
to soar, as the architect mastered the use of poured concrete to generate curving roofs, spiral ramps, and floating staircases.
For his own home, built in 1953, and the Edmundo Cavanelas house, from 1954, Niemeyer constructed light, transparent frames with dramatic
rooflines and paired them with painterly landscape designs by Roberto Burle Marx. Ironically, the houses became more rigidly rectilinear in the '80s, when the world embraced curves, possibly due to Niemeyer's
love of aesthetic antagonism and his belief in synthesis as the path to innovation.
- Bryony Roberts
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