Saltwater (releases March 2025)

By Katy Hays

Penguin Random House, 336 pages

★★★★

 

Booze, money, doppelgangers, paranoia, murder, and sun-blasted Capri… What else do you need? Saltwater, the new novel from Katy Hays (The Cloisters), will keep you off-guard. It contrasts old money with new, the latter of which scores low on the character and honesty scales.

 

The loaded Lingate family owes its wealth to a grandfather, an oil baron. As the old saying goes, you need money to make money. The parental generation swelled the coffers and sons Richard and Marcus have done well in Los Angeles, though Richard is mostly pomp and ego, and Marcus is all business.

 

Capri is where the Lingates summer. Those of us who’ve been there can attest it is stunningly beautiful, but also precarious. Unlike most islands in the Gulf of Naples it’s not volcanic, but its karstic landscape is filled with cliffs, caves, and rugged terrain. The Roman emperor Tiberius dispatched enemies by having them pushed into the sea from a high balcony of Villa Jovis. That method may have been the fate of Sarah Lingate, Richard’s wife, in 1992. Her body was identified after she “fell” from a cliffside wall in villa in which the family was staying. Local authorities suspected foul play, but evidence was scant and money buys attorneys and allies in high places.

 

Part I of Saltwater tells Sarah’s tale in her voice. She was a celebrated East Coast playwright before marrying Richard and moving to Los Angeles. After three years she is bored and angered by the controlling ways of the Lingates. They are reminiscent of movie mob families in their preoccupation with the “family,” which they interpret as a collective in which the will of individuals is secondary. That includes working wives, but Sarah is too intelligent, ambitious, and free-spirited. Not only does she want a divorce,  she has written an utterly brilliant play that could be seen as confessional. Bumbling Richard and forceful Marcus try to dissuade her from a reputation-damaging divorce, but she has a plan to  free herself–until she drowns after falling from a cliff. Hays tells her tale in the form of a sequential countdown of days and hours before she dies. Horrible accident or murder? A fancy necklace might hold the clue.

 

Part II jumps to 2022 and focuses on Helen, Sarah and Richard’s daughter who was three when her mother died. Capri is again the site of family drama and melodrama. This part of the novel involves a new investigation into Sarah’s death and throws the Lingates into a tizzy. Not only is family honor at stake, but it’s bad for pending business transactions. Marcus’ assistant Lorna Moreno plays a major role as well. The hours before her disappearance structures Part II.

 

Helen is pivotal, though as she’s the presumptive heir to the Lingate fortune. Marcus is married to Naomi, though they are childless. Naomi plays the part of an unreliable narrator, as we never know if she’s scheming, drunk, or too vacuous for anything except spending time and money in the boutiques along Capri’s Via Camerelle. Richard, Marcus, and Naomi all want to see Helen properly married, but she has her mother’s mind. She dallies with clueless Freddy but is also attracted to Ciro, whom she has known since both were children. The Lingates disapprove of Ciro, as he is the son of the villa’s caretaker Marina Piccola. (Marina has private thoughts on Sarah’s death.)

 

Lorna is an especially interesting character. It’s never entirely clear whose side she’s on, if any. She might be a con artist, Helen’s ally, or an innocent victim. All we know for sure is that millions of Euros change hands, but where they go  to is a mystery within the mystery. Will the Lingate castle crumble or will money prop up the foundations? You will not know until the end who is guilty of what. Hays intersperses newspaper clippings to build the drama.

 

Hays spins a riveting, page-turning yarn. One wonders, though, how readers will respond to the novel’s Deus ex machina resolutions. Some might find them very satisfying, others unconvincingly neat. I’m mostly in the second camp and was bothered by the contrivance of parallel plot lines. I had to remind myself that’s it fiction, not biography. It’s an exciting read no matter how you slice it–unless strict morality is your personal touchstone.

 

Rob Weir

https://off-centerviews.blogspot.com/

Hilma Fascinates in a Disjointed Telling

 

 

 

 

 

 

2019 Guggenheim Museum

Hilma (2023)

Directed by Lasse Hallström

Juno Films, 120 minutes, Not rated, In English

★★★

 

When was the above painted? Sometime in the 1960s? Who’s the artist? Perhaps a pop art painter like Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusma, or Peter Max? Answer: Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), two decades before anyone heard of pop art. She also did abstract nonrepresentational art well before Mondrian or Kandinsky took it up. Hilma was a non-conventional woman, but she wasn’t a hippie; she was a follower of Theosophy obsessed with spirits and all that went with them: Ouija boards, seances, meditation, communing with nature…. To further complicate matters, she was probably a lesbian at a time in which such an identity was shocking. The movie Hilma is a disjointed biographical picture from Lasse Hallström, the director of fare such as My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Cider House Rules, and ABBA videos. 

 

 

Hilma af Klint was very bright, though her parents seldom quite knew what to do with her. The death of younger sister Hermina exacerbated Hilma’s deep plunge into Theosophy and the search for the “High Masters,” once-human spiritually enlightened guides to the occult. She graduated with honors from Sweden’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts­, but because she was unorthodox and a woman, she struggled to find acceptance in the art world. Hilma gathered likeminded women around her in hope of setting up an atelier whose art would make others appreciate female painters and understand Theosophy.

 

Hilma was something of a Hallström home movie; his daughter Tora played young Hilma, and his wife (Lena Olin) took on the role of aging Hilma. Young Hilda was magnetic and headstrong. Her inner circle included Anna Cassel (Catharine Chalk), Mathilda, (Lily Cole), Cornelia (Rebecca Calder), and Sigrid (Maeve Dermody). The center of this part of the film is the relationship between Hilma and Anna, which Hallström presents as lesbian. (The historical record is suggestive, but not definitive.) Hilma depends upon Anna, who has money to burn and helps get various projects out of Hilma’s head and onto canvases–big ones. Hilma, though, is also fickle. Based on her youthful (mis)understanding, Hilma is convinced that Rudolph Steiner (Tom Wlaschiha) is her soulmate. Although a mystic, Steiner–an architect of Waldorf education­–thought Theosophy was bunk; his was a belief in anthroposophy, an objective explanation of the spiritual world. His dismissive remarks about Hilma’s art led her to quit painting for four years and ruined her relationship with Anna. Hallström suggests Hilma became interested in another woman, though that’s speculative. When Hilma picks up the brush again, she is again rebuffed by Steiner, and shifts her attention to building a “temple” that she and her associates create. She insisted all 196 cavasses be kept together and in an exact order.

 

Finding money for the temple is the obsessive quest of older Anna, whose own brother wants nothing to do with such a flight of fantasy. Only her nephew is kind to her, but he’s not wealthy. Thus, Hilma packed up her art and stipulated that it should not be displayed until 20 years after her death. In 2019, Hilma’s artwork finally got its day: a massive show at the Guggenheim. That was followed by a posthumous Stockholm temple.  

 

Hilma af Klint is hardly the first artist to die unrecognized but achieve renown in the future. Herein lies a problem with the film. It is as if Hallström could not make up his mind what the center of the tale should be. We know early on that Hilma was obsessive, as she throws herself in watching human dissections, studies botany, and announces her intention to make a map of “everything.” Is the film about obsession? Is it lesbianism? (Or, less charitably, the male gaze?) Is it an exploration of spiritualism and the thin walls between the objective and the realm of spirits? Hilma as an early inventor of modernism and nonrepresentational art? Hilma as stubborn to a fault?

 

All of these, of course, can be dimensions of a person’s personality, but the movie has no discernible takeaway message. Instead we get the equivalent of a stack of Polaroids, each image fascinating, but a life abstracted. The film is worth watching– Tora Hallström is both spunky and spiky and Catherine Chalk has commanding presence–but keep a roll of tape handy to fix the pieces in place.

 

Rob Weir

February 2025 Music: West of Rome, Yahtzee Brown, Chris Walz ,Trendafilka, Jason Carter, Deborah Holland, MahaMaya, Ethel/Moving Sound

 

Is rock and roll making a comeback? West of Rome gets labeled an “indie-rock/alt-country band,” but other than being from Texas, the “alt-country” side isn’t much in evidence on Keep It Fly in the Negative Zone. (The band’s name comes from a record from the late Vic Chestnut.) “Movement in Your Picture” is filled with gritty and grungy swagger. On “Keep it Fly,” vocalist Kevin Higginbotham channels a touch of Robert Plant as lead guitarist Charlie Roadman lets his solos fuzz and burn. The monster in “Face the Beast” is American violence and Old Nick himself is in the front seat of the nightmare hallucination “Take a Ride with the Evil One.” You don’t hear much music like this in Nashville.

 

 

 

 

Yahtzee Brown has a different vibe. He’s just 20 and Take it Back is his debut album. His father was a rock drummer and young Noah Siegel, his non-stage name, grew up hearing 60s and 70s rock and later took in a lot of indie rock. The title track lies in a in-between groove. His vocals and production are smooth, but Michael Lockwood’s bass is so solid it’s like a lead guitar. Echo effects push this song about relationships and troublemakers into a spacey psychedelia space. “I Guess I’m Sorry” shows he also picked up some outlaw country from his Waylon-Willie-Townes-loving parents. He brings buzz and noise to “Watching Over You” and some high-note electric and cacophony to counter his light tenor on “Halloween.” Brown’s split between classic and indie rock will challenge marketers to label him.   

 

---If you want a break from electric guitar, here are some radical changes of pace. 

 

 

 Bluegrass has gotten slick, but Chris Walz turns back the clock on All I Got and Gone, a throwback more in line with the bluegrass and old time songs of the early Folk Revival. Walz teaches at the Old School of Folk Music where he is considered folk music royalty. Listen to his clawhammer banjo on “Going Across the Sea,” playing resonator blues, doing his take on the traditional “Delia,” and grabbing a National steel guitar for a Mississippi John Hurt picking treatment to “See See Rider.” (It starts at 4:44.) To invoke Neil Young, this is a journey to the past (without the thorns).

 

 

 

Much of the music of Trendafilka comes from Georgia, the one whose capital is Tbilisi not Atlanta. Their new album For the Olives also features songs from the Balkans, Greece, Macedonia, and the Russian Steppes. That said, you’re not too far off if you thought Atlanta; the polyphonic singing of this 11-woman a cappella assemblage is based in New Orleans! The polyphonic vocals are Balkans style, meaning they feature 3, 4, and 5-part discrete melodies that blend into something as unfettered as the wild rose that is their namesake. Listen for strategic uses of dissonance, yips, yodels, complexity, and (were in Latin) songs that would be at home in a Romanesque cathedral. It’s a spectacular recording. Try any track from For the Olives and you’ll be hooked on Trendafilka. Start with “Mome Stojie Ju Livadi,” “Oi Na Dubori,” and a live clip of  “Mori Aida.”

 

 

Jason Carter once preferred classical music and nylon strings. On In and Out of Time Carter plays a Space Age-looking harp guitar and experimented with live looping techniques that might have made Bach barf. Carter has been something of a nomad who has visited over 100 countries and has recently lived in Finland, Singapore, and France. Not that he’s home all that often, what with his touring schedule and video projects. In and Out of Time has an international flair. “Finlandia” pays homage to living there, “One” was recorded in Singapore, “I Believe” In Kuwait, others with the Novosibirsk orchestra in Siberia, and so on. The harp guitar on the CD cover has 12 strings and he has apparently just gotten one with 23. That’s at least 17 more than I need!

 

 

 

American-Canadian Deborah Holland once fronted Animal Logic (which included Stewart Copeland of The Police) and has penned soundtracks for TV and movies. She also has an active solo career; I Made it This Far is her 7^th release. It has styling vaguely reminiscent of Carole King. This intriguing release includes “Wildfires,” a reference to ecological lowlights of 2023-24. They scorched over 13 million acres across Canada and turned skies yellow and sooty in the 48 provinces south of the border. (Sorry–couldn’t resist a poke at the wantwit in Washington DC.) In a serious vein, Holland’s dramatic piano, strong voice, accompanying video, and lyrics drive home the pathos of the “long black scars” left behind. The flip side of tragedy is her folky “Thankful,” which she wrote for Thanksgiving 2023, an enumeration of things she and sign-holding others count as blessings. These are the only two songs for which there are videos thus far as the LP drops on March 7. The rest of the album is mix of moving material (“A Long Time Ago”) the country-like (“Circling the Drain”), a celebration of beautiful days (“East Porpoise Bay”), nostalgia in a cheeky-yet-melancholy way (“50 Year Reunions”), and more. As Holland has aged, she has moved through several musical personae. I Made it This Far has more piano, a lush and dramatic counterpart to guitar-centric adult alternative music. She has also transitioned from American to Canadian, courtesy of a job at Langara College in Vancouver. Google her song “I Wanna Be a Canadian.”

 

 

 

My bad! At a very busy time I was sent A New Day  from the MahaMaya Band that got lost in the clutter. I’m really happy I found it. There is such much talk about “fusion” music, even if the final product has only a small burst of electric guitar or a hint of bluegrass. That’s not the case with the MahaMaya Band. At heart it’s a New Delhi-based duo of Mahalakshmi (keys, voice) and Emam (hand drums, guitar) but the “band” expands to wherever modern technology can connect musicians. A New Day spotlights help from other parts of India, Hungary, Poland, California, and New York to add bass, sitar, oud, sarod, and mandocello. The resultant music is ancient and modern, mystical and meditative. Try the title track and “Great Spirit.”

 

 

 

I’m afraid a joint project between the New York City string quartet Ethel and Taiwan’s A Moving Sound seems like a forced marriage because the vocals of Mia Hsieh in the later are too harsh for me. However, whether or not you’ll like it might depend on how much you like the wild lamentations, screams, and atonality of Yoko Ono’s sonic explorations. I realize that Ono is Japanese, not Taiwanese, so listen to “Dynasty Falls” and decide on your own. I love the instrumentals and admire Hsieu’s vocal dexterity and dramatic presentation skills, but I can’t relate to them. 

 

 

 

Coming in March: Mary Bue, Muriel Mwamba, Ron Pope, Michael Rudd, and ???

 

Rob Weir