Blue Nude

On a day when I needed to rejuvenate myself, I headed up a mountain between San Francisco and rural Marin County, the settings of Elizabeth Rosner's new book Blue Nude. I have my dog and the book in tow and settle into finishing this fine description of two divergent souls who meet on a creative journey. What I found so compelling in finishing this book is that it took me into a creative trance, usually only achieved when intimately involved in my own creative process. As an analytical type, I found myself not studying the writing or the characters, but instead being swept away by the accumulation of their experiences that result in art. In Ms. Rosner's first book, The Speed of Light, I was captivated by the experience of feeling the second-hand smoke of genocide, seen through the eyes of children of Holocaust survivors. It also gave us a more fresh and raw view of man against man, and the inhumanity that unfortunately is experienced by many peoples throughout the world. Blue Nude continues in this vein and explores characters not just for their own experience, but also the experience that have shaped the people that have shaped them. And Ms. Rosner doles out this information in a way that keeps us curious and expectant, while not feeling that any of it is predicable. I thoroughly enjoyed both books, not just for the story and the characters, but for the feelings they invoked in me while reading. These books are thought provoking beyond their last pages.

Blue Nude is a stirring, subtle and deep rendition of all that makes us human, and secures for novelist Elizabeth Rosner a place in the pantheon of important American authors. Those who were moved by her first novel, The Speed of Light, and hoped for more, can rejoice. Her new work delivers the goods as few second novels have, bearing the unmistakable hallmarks of Arrival. The subliminal iconography of the story alone is enough to enliven one's dreams. Burning buildings, the naked female form on display, skeletons, corpses and cadavers, swastikas, exploding buses, girls with guns, empty canvases, empty deserts, a car driven into the fog on the edge of a continent. But while the reader's imagination is crowded, the page remains spacious. Rosner's mastery of the poetics of prose is on full display in Blue Nude, showing us the lyrical majesty inherent in the common details of lives without wasting a word. This is a book that seems to defy gravity along with conventional wisdom. A simple narrative of an encounter and the memories that surround it, Blue Nude keeps lifting off the ground into the cloud filled skies of allegory without ever actually becoming one. It's the in-between places in Rosner's writing that hold the most meaning, perhaps because we are not expecting to find it there. Post-war European apartment buildings come at us like prophets spreading revelations about character and history. Lap swimmers part the water with their strokes the way our decisions separate the past from the future. Brushes are loaded with paint the way our lives swell with intent before action. It's almost as if the `important' scenes are place holders for the `fillers' and the `fillers' hold important messages from beyond - as if some hand other than the author's is directing the action. It's a story of threatened survival, not of the body, but of the spirit. Our two protagonists scurry forward beneath the impending boot heel of history, and with time running out, their moves are inexorably reduced to turning either toward or away from each other, a choice made excruciating by their pasts. Danzig is German, the son of a brutish Nazi father. Merav is Israeli, the granddaughter of a woman saved from the ravages of the holocaust only by her beauty. Each hopes that their flight from the Old World to the New, from the confines of their cultures to the freedom of personal artistic expression will save them. They meet in the Danzig's life drawing class at the San Francisco Academy of Art when she comes to model as a substitute. Danzig, a once successful artist, is now blocked as he nears the end of his prime and the demons he has spent a lifetime outrunning come home to roost with a vengeance. Merav, a young woman fighting to maintain her vitality and authenticity in a world intent upon objectifying her, has traded in the Israeli Army for the art studio where she fights a different kind of war. The book opens with her disrobing and standing naked before Danzig

?I read BLUE NUDE in one take. I couldn't stop. Then I re-read the last section because I felt as if I had raced too fast to the end. The prose is gorgeous--lyrical, exact. It feels to me more like an extended poem than a novel. I don't mean that the writing is "poetic" but that it has the hallmarks of poetry: concision and compression. I wanted there to be more, but that's not a criticism. I think it's just the right length. I think BLUE NUDE is a harder book than Rosner's first novel, THE SPEED OF LIGHT, but that, too, is not a criticism. I think the pain and loss go deeper here; at times, they seem almost unbearable. But Rosner's beautiful, sure writing holds us, compels us forward to a redemption that seems totally earned. The novel ends with a scene that's breathtaking in its inventiveness and its rightness. I can't get the images out of my mind, and I'm grateful to Rosner for giving them to me, for making me see that there is always a choice beyond despair.

Elizabeth Rosner's extraordinary writiing gift is that, like many novelists, she knows how to tell a compelling story that urges you along, yet with her writing you feel organically immersed in a cover-to-cover poetic experience. Rosner gives us flesh and blood characters who are real, imperfect , suffering, spirited and yet always pointed in the direction of love and redemption. Her prose is so exquisite that you can't help but re-read one beautiful line after another, amazed at her ability to touch the depth of human experience in such moving, well-crafted language. Give yourself the treat of a quiet afternoon, the phone turned off, your favorite drink at your side, and a copy of Blue Nude.