Chroistopher Moore on Vampires and Writing

Read and respond with a comment to Christopher Moore interview.  What is your experience with contemporary vampire fiction?  Classical vampire fiction (Dracula)? Have you read Twilight or Anne Rice?
www.chrismoore.com/writing_vampire.html

Read first chapter online:

http://www.chrismoore.com/writing_vampire.htm

http://www.chrismoore.com/interviews/writing-the-vampire/

Watch the following videos and the videos on the video bar.
http://watchmojo.com/index.php?id=8330

http://watchmojo.com/index.php?id=8357 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bhb744dw18

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/22/the-new-vampires-9-possib_n_620202.html#s103541 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBsNmM3ADp0&feature=related


Read to pg. 117 for Tuesday

Finish Fugitive Pieces/Bloodsucking Fiends

Fugitive Pieces Stories are due.  View end of movie.

New book: Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore
Reading Group Guide

Questions for Discussion

1. Everyone has been exposed to Vampire lore, either through books, movies, or television. How does Jody's transformation into a vampire differ from how you always thought someone became a vampire? In what ways is it similar?

2. Jody and Tommy's relationship moves at a rather alarming pace, and within a week of meeting each other, they are in love. Is love at first sight possible? Or in their case, at first bite? Why do they connect so instantly?

3. The book is filled with religious connotations, whether intentional or not — from the mention of "the pyramid" (The TransAmerica Tower), to the use of crosses to ward off vampires, to the Animals being referred to as "Crusaders." How intentional do you think this was on the part of the author? What do these add to the story?

4. The book touches upon the idea of euthanasia — the practice of ending the life of a terminally ill person in a painless or minimally painful way in order to limit suffering — in that Elijah Ben Sapir, the vampire who creates Jody, only kills those who are about to die or whose lives are limited in some way. What are your feelings about "mercy killings"? Do vampires have an ethical standard?

5. When Simon threatens Jody after she refuses to turn him into a vampire, she ends up killing him in the front of his truck. Jody then blames the killing on Elijah, however, and never confesses it to Tommy. Why not admit to it when Elijah has been restrained?

6. Why are Jody and Tommy "set up" as the culprits in the recent crimes? What would it mean if they were caught? Why do these crimes need to be pinned on anyone? Couldn't the criminals cover up thecrimes in another way?

7. By the end of the novel, both detectives — Cavuto and Rivera — begin to believe in the supernatural and that vampires could exist. To what extent do you believe in the supernatural, either vampires, ghosts, or even just that some people may or may not have psychic ability?

8. Tommy uses Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat, which of course is fiction, as his "Owner's Manual" for learning about Jody and her new powers. Discuss the author's use of fiction within fiction in order to tell a story. Have any members of your group read The Vampire Lestat? How do the two books compare?

9. Once Jody becomes a vampire, she finds that she has many new and different abilities, including superstrength, heightened senses, and superspeed. Which do you think is her most needed new superability?

10. Though Jody finds herself immortal, she also retains many of her normal human characteristics and failings, including vanity, fear, anger, and disgust. Discuss how even though she has become immortal, and can protect herself from many of the regular dangers of everyday life, she is still unable to disassociate herself from normal human emotion.

11. At the end of the book, the reader is left with the impression that Jody is about to turn Tommy into a vampire. If she does change him into a vampire, how do you imagine their story continues? How would it continue if she does not?

Enhancing Your Bookclub

1. Would you be willing to give up your normal life — being able to go out in the daylight, not being immortal — in order to become a vampire? You'd be able to live forever, have superstrength and -speed, among many other different gifts. Would it be worth it? Why? Why not?

2. To read more about vampires, take a look at the following titles: The Society of S by Susan Hubbard, Vamped by David Sosnowski, The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula by Tim Lucas, and Happy Hour at Casa Dracula by Marta Costa.

3. Learn more about vampires: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampires.

Christopher Moore is the bestselling author of You Suck, A Dirty Job, The Stupidest Angel, Fluke, Lamb, The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, Island of the Sequined Love Nun, Bloodsucking Fiends, and Practical Demonkeeping. Visit the

official Christopher Moore website at www.chrismoore.com.

Fugitive Pieces--to the end

Book II, Vertical Time Analysis
 The ninth chapter is brief and impressionistic. It opens with Ben describing the mechanics and effects, physical and psychological, of the meltemi wind on Idhra. It reminds the reader of Ben's specialization, weather, and helps picture the Greek Islands far better than Jakob has in his quick passages here and there. He quickly gets lost in the treasures of the huge, eclectic library, but cannot find the journals. He pictures Jakob burying them, as Jakob himself earlier describes Jews doing with their treasures, including writings. He then comes upon parts of the house that have long been closed off and forgotten. Note the chest in which Jakob as a boy had hidden from the Nazis. He likens the picture of interrupted life that he experiences with the excavations at Vesuvius. He pictures Jakob and Michaela's daily lives and, notably, is envious. This mirrors his attitude towards Naomi's relationship with his mother. He contemplates how Michaela undresses his spirit and brings his life to belief. The phrase is gradually developed in italics, suggesting that it is a line from Jakob's poetry that helps Ben interpret what he is seeing and feeling. He is struck by how powerfully he feels Jakob and Michaela present, seeking to be alone, even though he knows the circumstances and certainty of their deaths. Recall the mystical passages in Book I from the Zohar, stating that, "All visible things will be born again invisible" and Jakob's frequent meditations on unfinished lives.

Book II, Phosphorus Analysis
The tenth chapter opens with a study of lightning from the scientific and anecdotal points of view. Both narrators have piled up interesting stories on various subjects in this way. They lead this time, however, to Petra, Ben's four-month lover on Idhra. It is filled with his enthusiasm of early enchantment, which he and Jakob have both earlier described and moves through their sharing of Jakob's passion for communing with Jakob's spirit. He also thinks about losing Naomi. Petra is responsible to two discoveries: a note from Michaela to Jakob announcing that she is pregnant, and Jakob's lost journals. The former, a surprise, turns up under the bed cover, awaiting the Roussoses' return from Athens. The latter turns up while Ben is cleaning up the mess that Petra makes of Jakob's library. He finds a forgotten wing of the house and wanders through interrupted lives, feeling that Jakob and Michaela are present and want to be alone.
The chapter fills in the final details on Ben's parents' life before the camp and describes how Father escapes to join the partisans. It is a rather heroic posture for the man who has been shown to be frightened of his shadow . Ben recalls stories of digging up mass graves to hide Nazi atrocities, relying on Jakob's published words. Ben contemplates whether fear can be passed down to children, worrying about his own progeny, should he have any. He sees a number tattooed on a baby's head. Recall him lying next to Father's camp tattoo while listening to music. Petra, who is introduced and quickly dispatched in the familiar fashion, he imagines being tattooed by lightning.
A storm not unlike Hazel strikes Idhra on the night that Ben finds Petra tearing apart Jakob's library. Rebuked, she storms away. As he restores order, Ben sings Liuba Levitsky's song to lure Jakob and Michaela back. He finds the lost journals and a scarf identical to Naomi's. It seems likely that in the final chapter he will try to reconcile with Naomi.

Book II, The Way Station Analysis
The final chapter takes place in Athens and aboard a homebound plane. Ben sees Petra already taking up with another man. He encounters lovers on the mountainside and realizes that he must try to come back to his wife. On the flight, he imagines possible scenarios for the meeting and scenes of his parents - as he recalls them and as they should have and probably had been, outside his sight: completing a circuit of strength. Ben sees that he must give what he most needs.

Fugitive Pieces Reading and Writing/ Contest information

Continue reading Book II of Fugitive Pieces.  Finish reading the book over the weekend.

Fugitive Pieces 5 page short stories are also due on Tuesday of next week (Week 5 of marking period which ends Oct. 14).  Continue to work on these.


WRITING CONTESTS

Bennington Contest:

www.bennington.edu/NewsEvents/YoungWritersCompetition/YW_Submission.aspx

Nancy Thorpe contest:

www.hollins.edu/academics/english/thorp.shtml

Young Arts:

www.youngarts.org/apply

www.pomegranatewords.com/magazine/teen_writing_contests.html


Book II, The Drowned City Analysis
The eighth chapter begins Book II, in which a new narrator takes over. Ben, no last name ever mentioned, teaches at the University of Toronto, having been mentored by Maurice Salman, Athos's old colleague. Maurice encourages the young man to coordinate his interests in weather and biography, a combination of which Athos and Jakob would approve. Ben finds that Jakob's poetry helps him understand his own parents, whose names are never mentioned. They are deeply-scarred survivors of the Holocaust. Much of the chapter, addressed personally to the late Jakob Beer, describes Ben's growing up, failed marriage, and snippets of his career as a scholar.
The psychological effects of surviving the Holocaust are laid out in Ben's parents. Mother opens up to the sensual joys of life, while Father closes down. He refuses to live in an ethic neighborhood for fear that the authorities will round them up. He is spooked while signing up for Canadian Social Security when what appears to be an ex-camp official challenges his birth certificate and when a neighbor pounds on his door to warn him to flee the path of Hurricane Hazel. The family barely escapes with their lives. Father moves them into a small apartment, where all doors look alike. Recall Jakob's life-long trauma cause by the kicking in of his family's door when the Nazis come for them. Father forbids talk about murdered relatives, but Mother fills Ben in on those who have been lost. The secret bonds them. Ben has a hard time as an adolescent in asserting his independence and through college remains a loner. He confesses that he never understands his father until his father commits suicide. The revelation of this act at the close of the chapter is unexpected, given Ben's description of dealing with his parents' physical decline in old age. For a while, Ben nearly avoids seeming churlish.

Music remains a major theme, as Ben's father is a former conductor demoted after the war to piano teacher. He dissects scores as he listens to recordings and only while listening to music does he open up to his son. Ben recalls lying on his father's lap listening to music. His eyes fall on the pale camp tattoo on his father's arm. During forced marches between camps, Father plays Beethoven in his head to keep his sanity. Ben's wife, Naomi is also devoted to music of all kinds. Naomi tells Jakob about the Jewish opera singer Liuba Levitska, who dies in the camps when she will not abandon her mother. Levitska has all of the inmates singing "Tsvey Taybelech" (Two Little Doves; pg. 240). Another inmate defies the Nazis by composing a song that fills the camps. Recall that a major goal of the Nazis is to de-humanize their victims, so composing music is a major act of defiance.

While Athos has broad interests in literature and poetry, which he imparts to his war, Ben devotes his professional career to combining meteorology throughout history with literature, biography, and history. For his thesis he pictures accompanying Dostoevsky into the square where he is subjected to a mock execution before being marched to exile in Siberia. Many details of this incident, which transforms the great Russian writer's life, are included. Ben writes two books and the summary takes rapid note of a plethora of writers, musicians, and historical figures and events that weather has influenced. Ben observes that even the most reticent figures in history (e.g., Henry James, who burns his correspondence) can have their stories reconstructed, but the successful biographer penetrates the assumptions by which the subject lives. Ben has difficulty figuring out the assumptions of his own parents and wife. Between descriptions of Ben's research and his wife's eclectic interests and penchant for trivia and non-sequiturs, the chapter abounds in seemingly random but fascinating anecdotes.
Besides the historical hurricane and flood, which occasions the chapter title, tornadoes are described as arbitrary. Many examples of survival side-by-side with utter destruction and bits of whimsy - lakes having their water sucked up and dropped again, people, animals, and objects being transported vast distances but then set down intact, etc., are quoted. Mother, hearing them, thinks instinctively about the evil winds of Nazism that are planned out and arbitrary. Her three focal points are the camps, Kristallnacht (mentioned in Book I in conjunction with the invention of nuclear fission), and the SS.
Ben's beautiful, intelligent wife Naomi is introduced and, like Jakob's first wife, Alex, is rather swiftly dispatched. Naomi bonds with his parents in ways that he cannot understand. She gives them the space that they need and Mother opens up to her, telling her about the two children that perish in the camps. Ben's parents had apparently agreed not to tell him. Naomi reveals that they call him Ben, not a proper name but the Hebrew word for "son," hoping that he will be spared if he is not named. There is a veiled reference to the Exodus 12. Recall earlier mentions of how Jews throughout history identify morally with the founding event in their history. It is always a "now" event, undertaken by them as well as their ancestors.
Jakob takes an obvious interest in Naomi when they first meet at a party and she, uncharacteristically, tells him all about her and Ben's family. Ben finds himself jealous, but fights it because Jakob is his hero and develops into the true specialty of his academic career, as seen in the concluding chapters. Ben is less tolerant of Naomi's good relations with his parents and, when she suggests that he go to Idhra to collect Jakob's papers, he follows through. This destroys their already shaky marriage. Passages describing the beginning of their relationship are unusually lyrical and erotic. There is another passage that evokes the Christian sacrament of penance, as Jakob listens to Naomi's stories not like a priest, but as a sinner seeking redemption, and his words makes them afterwards feel clean. Ben notices a physical transformation in Naomi, brought about by love.

Ben's adolescent interest in bog people and how they differ from from pictures of Holocaust victims reaches back to the early chapters of Book I, detailing Athos' research. This helps link the two parts, as do the two narrators' marital troubles. Neither disguises his responsibility for the failures. The long chapter establishes the intellectual debt that Ben owes to Jakob, and thus to Athos. As the chapter ends, Ben is bound, like Jakob before him, for Greece.

Essay #1 Fugitive Pieces on Book 1

Carefully read the following excerpt from an essay about the role of memory in Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces:

Both thematically and stylistically, Fugitive Pieces is an exercise in "poetic knowing," an epistemological mode (epistemology: a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge) that Michaels carefully distinguishes from mere knowledge in a meditation on love, poetry, and memory entitled "Cleopatra’s Love" in the March 1994 number of Poetry Canada Review:

The distinction between knowledge and "poetic knowing" resembles the distinction between history and memory. Knowledge/History is essentially amoral: events occurred. "Poetic Knowing"/Memory is inextricable linked with morality: history’s source is event, but memory’s source is meaning. Often what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers.
     Memory, like love, gains strength through restatement, reaffirmation; in a culture, through ritual, tradition, stories, art. Memory courts our better selves; it helps us recognize the importance of deed; we learn from pleasure just as we learn from pain. And when memory evokes consideration of what might have been or been prevented, memory becomes redemptive. As Israeli poet Yehudi Amichai wrote: "to remember is a kind of hope."
                                                                                                                           (15)

Or as Jakob puts it in the novel:

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.
                                                                                                                         (138)

Acutely aware though she doubtless is of the problems of historical imagination and literary representation,² Michaels nevertheless attempts in Fugitive Pieces "to speak of events…that one has not witnessed, that one has not lived through personally but has absorbed through the culture, through the family, through the home" for, as she told Douglas Fetherling in an interview published shortly after the appearance of the novel, she felt "an obligation to establish some relationship" with "the largest and most devastating reality" of the twentieth century "in order to try to understand how one emerges" from such an event with a capacity for "faith" and the capability to "move towards a place of love in the world" ("Narrative Moves" 16, 18).
www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/michaels/crit.htm

Using specific examples from the text, write an essay that analyzes how Jakob emerges from the events of the Holocaust "with a capacity for 'faith' and the capability to 'move to a place of love in the world.'"  Does memory become redemptive for Jakob?  Does it become "a kind of hope"?  (Use this as a critical lens)

Be specific and avoid mere plot summary.

HMK: Continue reading Fugitive Pieces and finish the book for Friday.

Fugitive Pieces

FOR MONDAY:


READ to pg. 195, the end of Book One.   There will be a test on BOOK ONE (mostly as a check that you have been reading--so if you have been reading, you're okay.  If not, well...get on with it...)


For today, we'll see some more of the film and give you time to work on your short stories.

Book I, Terra Nullius
Book I, Terra Nullius Summary
Jakob returns to Greece, missing Alex, and disoriented by tourists and traffic. Everything has changed in Athens, Zakynthos, where the old house is fittingly in ruins, and Idhra, where in the Roussos family home he writes this account. As Jakob looks through Athos's library, he recalls the broad education that he has received. He selects a small volume of Psalms to read himself to sleep and opens at random to a section about a worn-out, suffering man, torn hand and foot, but ultimately exalted by God.
Idhra opens Jakob's memory and he spends long nights writing and dealing with questions that have no answers. He notes that Jews live in an eternal present, always identifying with those who leave Egypt. They are responsible for time and must make moral decisions that have effect beyond this life. Jakob offers the parable of a famed rabbi who travels incognito in shabby clothing and is ridiculed by passengers. When they find out who he is, they beg forgiveness, but he refuses, even on the Day of Awe, because they have wronged the man on the train, not himself. The moral: nothing erases an immoral act. When the victim is dead, only silence remains. Recorded history can be resurrected. Destruction turns presence into absence. That rabbi will forever know humiliation but not be humiliated, as the painted clock at Treblinka station always reads 3 o'clock. Einstein talks of simultaneous events: a train arrives at a certain time because it coincides with the clock and someone notices this. The Holocaust has witnesses, and neither evil nor good acts can be erased. Being moral in those days consists of the tiniest acts but elevates the doers higher than the angels. Evil can be a single occurrence, but goodness requires repetition.
On Idhra Jakob finally feels comfortable writing English poetry. He feels at home in Greece, but also forever a stranger. He finishes writing Groundwork. Jakob thinks about the Nazis' efforts to dehumanize the Jews to make it easier psychologically for the troops to exterminate them. When they realize, however, that they are not dealing with "figuren" as propaganda holds, but with humans who refuse to be degraded and can only be killed, this triggers brutality and they choose to live by the lie and do their job. The few heroes who rescue others also have no choice: they do as truth requires. New Adam must rise from the place of greatest degradation.
Jakob imagines Bella in a crowded camp barracks, practicing her keyboard fingering silently. Her skins is degrading painfully. When the gas chamber door is opened there is always a tangled pyramid of bodies clambering for the last air. There are babies half-born. Screams are heard through the thick walls. Despair, however, transforms mercilessly into faith. Jakob knows that he must embrace faith, which will never be as perfect again. Like caged birds drawn to the magnetic pole when it is time to migrate, humans are moved by instinct, which seems to disappear with the body. Jakob's body cannot forget his loved ones, but he realizes that Bella, like all of the dead, wants to get close enough to push him back into the world.
"To remain with the dead is to abandon them."  pg. 170

Book I, Terra Nullius Analysis
The sixth chapter is entitled "No Man's Land" in Latin, but shows Jakob finally coming to grips with himself. Having separated from Alex, but clearly hoping to reform to the point that she can take him back, he goes to Greece alone. He gives rapid impressions of the country that has just been restored to a constitutional democracy, which suggests that the events take part during 1970. He alludes to prominent artists who suffer under the military junta for being communists: the composer Mikis Theodorakis, best known in the West for Zorba the Greek, and the poet Giannis Ritsos.
Moonlight Sonata:

I know that each one of us travels to love alone,

alone to faith and to death.

I know it. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.

Let me come with you.  

Yannis Ritsos

(Does this poem shed light on the meaning of the novel and Jakob's search?)

Everything in Greece has changed and seems odd to Jakob, who settles into Athos's ancestral home on Idhra Island and indicates that he writes this account of his life in Athos's study. The homecoming observations are rapid and impressionistic.
There are several oddly positive references to Christianity in the chapter. First, when Jakob takes a book of psalms to read himself to sleep, he turns at random to Ps. 22, which in the Christian reading is a prophecy of Jesus' crucifixion. He also describes how Idhra has watched over and blessed everywhere weathered old icons. He refers to the face of "their Redeemer" without sarcasm. He states clearly that he feels out of place in Greece and in particular with the new bustle and commercialism, which had bothered him also in Toronto. He reiterates Athos's contention, several times already mentioned, that the Hebrew and Greek scripts form a harmony and the two cultures share a unique historic destiny. Note that Jakob finds the prayer shawl (tallit) that Athos gives him but he never uses. He is struck by the intense blue color of its stripes. He describes the requirement that one forgive others and seek forgiveness on the Day of Atonement, which he calls by the generic term Day of Awe, meaning the High Holy Days. Characters in a story are scandalized that a renowned rabbi refuses to absolve them for mistakenly scorning him. The rabbi, however, does not identify with the one scorned and insists they seek forgiveness from him.
This is a fine example of the parable, a story illustrating a moral, and a literary form much identified with Jesus. Jakob is able to surmount prejudice. Much of the chapter deals with good and evil, using this extended parable and a series of aphorisms, interwoven with snippets of Bella's concern for orchestration as she memorizes musical scores. This underscores how firmly she remains in her brother's mind. In the end, he decides that her spirit stays close not in order to draw him to her but to be in a position to push him back into the world.
Idhra gets Jakob writing again, including the poetry for which he is soon to become well known. To date, his attempts have sounded like ghost stories even to friends. He writes feverishly all night, as had Athos. The first example he gives, set in italics, is parabolic: Zdena and Bettina growing to resemble one another.
Many more details of life during the Holocaust emerge: the never-changing painted clock face at Treblinka station, the coming together of victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, the virtue of the few who help save lives. Jakob emphasizes that evil needs only occur once, but goodness requires repetition. Jews in all generations identify with the generation of the Exodus and take part mystically in that trek. There is collective unity also in the Holocaust. Having approached the subject several times, Jakob analyzes how the Nazis manage to kill so many people without conscience or remorse.

He finds the key in photographs of the officers, laughing. Propaganda has convinced them that Jews are sub-human, so there is no crime in eliminating them - it is, in fact, a necessity, like sanitation. The problem comes when the killers discover that the Jews are, in fact, human, and the shock triggers brutality. They choose to live by the comfortable lie and do their job. (see pg. 165-166)
Jakob pictures life in crowded camp barracks and death in the gas chambers. (pg. 168)  In horrible detail he portrays opening the doors onto carnage, but finds that the piles of twisted corpses struggling to survive on the last pockets of air provide an "obscene testament of grace". The phrase, rather tinged by the Christian outlook, leads him to perceive how despair transforms into faith, which he finally embraces.

Ch. 5 Phosoporus

Book I, Phosphorus Summary

In 1968, Jakob and Bella enter a soundless, colorful dream. A river flows to the music of Brahms. When Bella disappears, the dream turns nightmarish and Jakob feels wrong about being married to Alex and living in a foreign land. He feels as though he has disappeared and Bella is searching for him. He recalls Bella's practicing and playing with adult passions.

Jakob meets Alex at a fine music library in the park where he listens to composers systematically by alphabet. She is an energetic woman who is adept at punning. Raised by her physician father on stories of the British military and word wit, she develops a passion for listening to music. Acting sophisticated, Alex is awkwardly innocent and seems to promise Jakob freedom. It takes five years for their attraction to end, but the signs show early. Jakob feels insecure around her Marxist friends and she has trouble dealing with his shyness. She is restless when they visit the Salmans but seems to enjoy the security of marriage, especially not having to cook. Two years into the marriage, Jakob's nightmares return, spoiling their sex life.
Jakob muses about how the fourteenth-century Catalan Atlas is honest about designating unknown regions. History is less frank, forcing one to remember what it covers up as if it were a watermark leaking through. He recalls Bella practicing her fingering and telling stories about Brahms. Jakob and their mother memorize the fragments that she practices, but when she plays the whole piece through, Jakob gets lost.
Returning to history and memory, Jakob contrasts history as the Totenbuch of the concentration camps and memory as the Memorbucher of the synagogue. The former is amoral and the latter moral. History and memory share time and space and every moment is really two moments. Examples are how the Nazis and the Lublin scholars view the destruction of holy books, how Nazis and mothers in Lódz react to the soldiers "catching" infants on their bayonets, and how a woman in Birkenau carries a photograph of her husband and daughter under her tongue in order not to be separated from them.
Jakob cannot resist reading the horrors of history because he needs to know where Bella actually dies. He had hoped that marrying Alex would bring light to his life, but it pushes him down into the mud. He is obsessed not with the details of where Holocaust victims come from, what they do or is done to them, but whether they are silent or speak, keep their eyes open or closed at the precise moment of death. He wonders how this relates to the gradual instant of geology. Jakob sees in Alex's belongings and behaviors parallels to memories of Bella, whose remembered music helps him recover better than the touch of Alex's body. Nothing releases the dreamer.
In the gradual erosion of the cliffs on which his friends, the Truppers, have built their house, Alex also perceives that every moment is two moments, just as in 1942, Jews hide in the painted caves of Lascaux and listen to Mozart, while at Auschwitz a prison orchestra accompanies the doomed. Caves are temples. The ground speaks - through Oracles at Delphi and holy mass graves. Germans turn humans into objects just as physicists are turning matter into energy. When Alex turns on lights, Jakob's memories and stories slip away. He feels that she is brainwashing and wants him to begin anew. When she leaves him, everyone thinks that she is at fault, but Jakob knows it is his fault. He has lost desire. He hears Bella tapping their secret goodnight code through the wall and recalls Bella telling him a terrible story about Brahms falling in love with Clara Schumann, wife of the composer whom Brahms adores. Brahms never marries and is so distraught when she dies that he barely makes it to the end of her burial. Jakob cannot imagine the trauma of Jews whose lives are cut off, left unfinished.
In July, Alex respects Jakob enough to declare that she can stand no more. He assumes that she has met someone else. She notes that she will remove all trace of herself, everything that means nothing to him already, because he is ungrateful. Mama and Papa leave thirty-two tins of food and promise to return before he has eaten the last one. He has four books, which he repeatedly reads. He is not to step outside the door. He obeys, even when the food runs out and he gets lightheaded. He hears music outside and considers floating up through a crack. Jakob cannot move a muscle throughout July.

Book I, Phosphorus Analysis
The fifth chapter introduces and dispatches Jakob's first wife, Alex. The action has jumped forward to 1968. They are radically different personalities and each approaches the one thing that unites them, the love of music, differently. Alex is carefree, frivolous, and attracted to Marxism. Jakob, who has seen ideologies go bad in practice, is uncomfortable. Music makes him draw comparisons to lost Bella, his nightmares return, and they drift apart. He appreciates Alex's honesty in calling it quits. He blames her for nothing and does not withhold from the reader how badly he treats her as his depression deepens. At the end of the chapter, he is totally dysfunctional, leaving the reader to wonder - indeed, worry - about his future.
Bella's musical focus earlier is Beethoven and in particular his Moonlight Sonata. He is mentioned again, in connection with mysterious love letters to an "Immortal Beloved", whose identity is debated in musicological literature. The phrase here is used merely to heighten the poetic atmosphere. Bella is shown also to have concentrated much of her practice time, which is described in detail on Johannes Brahms' Intermezzo No. 2. Much attention is given to Bella's care over orchestration notes. Bella also tells the sad story of Brahms' unrequited love for his friend's wife.
Jakob has earlier stated several times how he exists during World War II outside the experience of his people. He has several times shown how the Jews are forced to hide in ways that resemble benign activities, and here cites several more, almost in passing. Jakob's obsession with the Holocaust continues to grow, particularly because he does not know his sister Bella's precise fate. He fixates on the precise moment of death and what the victims do. Athos's teachings about geology provide a parallel, as the painfully slow processes whereby wood becomes stone, peat becomes coal, and limestone becomes marble eventually come to a culmination. He calls it a "gradual instant", like death.
Jakob draws parallels involving archeology and music. Jews are shown hiding in the famed caves of Lascaux in southern France, listening to Mozart. The caves contain Paleolithic paintings of animal hunts. Parallel with this, at Auschwitz, a prison orchestra accompanies the doomed to the gas chambers and ovens. The selection process at the primary death camp is described in more detail later. Jakob draws a parallel between the Oracles at Delphi speaking from a grotto - a hole in the ground - and the bodily voices calling out from the mass graves. He has already described how these holes in the ground are sanctified and sanctifying. Jakob mentions how the Nazis turn humans into objects to justify their treatment of the Jews, but does not develop the theme until later. Instead, he parallels this with physicists turning matter into energy in this same period. A brick's worth of uranium releasing its power in nuclear fission would destroy whole cities. He then masterfully notes that the Nazis thrown regular bricks during Kristallnacht, the staged demonstration that initiates the terror against the Jews. These concatenated passages are quite powerful.