You or Someone Like You Makes a Dream Summer Read
Chandler Burr will be reading from his debut novel You or Someone Like You at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 24, at the Elliott Bay Book Company.
Though this is Chandler Burr's first novel, he is also the author of three other non-fiction books: The Perfect Scent, The Emperor of Scent, and A Separate Creation. And if you're smelling sensing a particular theme, you're on the right track--Burr has been the The New York Times scent critic since August '06.
What the hell is a scent critic? you may be wondering...we know we were. Even as faithful NYT readers, we wondered why we'd never heard of this field of criticism. Regardless, it exists and his website has all of his past articles to prove it.
(We're also curious as to how Burr became a scent critic, since his bio includes a Masters in International Economics and Japan studies, a beginning journalism career for the Christian Science Monitor's Southeast Asia bureau in Manila, and further study of Chinese history in Beijing.)
You or Someone Like You--which has absolutely nothing to do with perfume or smelling anything of any kind--delves instead into Judaism and classic Western authors and poets. It seems unlikely, but this novel is sure to be a book clubber's summer dream read--we can just smell it.
The novel centers around Anne Rosenbaum, wife to fictional big-time Hollywood executive Howard Rosenbaum, and their son Sam. Anne and Howard met in their twenties while studying literature at Columbia in New York. By chance, Howard is thrown into the glitzy movie world, and they move to L.A., where Anne, regardless of fortune and a famous husband, would rather spend her time reading literature in her garden instead of shopping on Rodeo.
One of Howard's friends--the head of a studio--asks Anne to make her a reading list and from there on, screenwriters, producers, agents, and many more begin to call, pleading to be put on the list of what has become an elite, exclusive book club. Though one director has reminded her that, "No one reads in Hollywood," she only gains popularity--she has to hire a personal assistant dedicated to the book club--as she begins to reveal her world to all the so-called non-readers who are eating out of her palm the words of Donne, Yeats, Mamet, and Auden, and her own brilliant, outspoken opinions. As Anne says:
I was asked, I say to them, to talk about why some people hate literature. Why some groups, regimes, systems, religions fear it. [...] The reason is obvious, of course. Literature shows us who and what we really are, whether we like it or not. This isn't an original observation. But there it is.
Besides the story of Anne's exclusive book club, the novel also has a strongly opinionated view of Judaism. Burr says, in fact, that it's "fundamentally critical of Judaism." While Anne grew up as the daughter of a British diplomat, Howard grew up in Brooklyn as an Orthodox Jew, and when his parents were not pleased about his choice in a non-Jewish wife, he walked away from most of his religion. After their seventeen-year old son Sam is turned away from a yeshiva in Israel because Anne is not Jewish, Howard goes through a personal identity crisis that brings him back to the religion he had once left, leaving Anne to try and reconcile their marriage with Judaism.
Throughout You or Someone Like You, you can't help but consider your own principles on nationalism, race, or culture, and wonder if you too have always made the right choices regarding them when it comes to others. As in one passage Anne notes:
What is called "Judaism," both the religion and the culture, consist in their practice of this division must always and only work in one direction. How convenient and good racialism is when you're doing it, when it's you keeping you a separate, integral, coherent group. How inconvenient and terrible it is when others are doing it to you.
