Heartwood

Heartwood is really a work of "magical realism," aided and abetted by the elements of the plot dealing with the Ladino culture out of which its title character Gaspar Castillo is created. A la Marquez et al, the terrain is vast encompassing the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe, Jewish culture (including Cabalism), Romani culture (in the form of a sex siren named Minette) the Spanish Civil War and eventually Gaspar's immigration to the US where he is taken up by the music publisher Carl Fischer and is introduced to jazz by none other than Charlie Parker, in front of whom he improvises.

The use of the historical citations and figures which include Meyer Lansky and Ada Louise Huxtable recall Doctorow's Ragtime, which also used music as a historical signifier. The narrative is composed of musical leitmotifs rendering Gaspar's particularly disarming compositions-which have a parapsychological effect on his audiences.

Instrumentation and musical composition are one of the most difficult things to describe in words and the passages relating to music and also the building of an instrument from a piece of sanctified spruce are some of the most masterful and affecting in Gaspar's Guitar.

The actual ending and epilogue hinge on an Orphic idea-with the birds Gaspar has always attracted returning him to his roots. In general, the writing is extremely vivid and the narrative leaves an indelible impression on the reader.

The whole expanse of the novella is putatively about music, but also functions as a metaphor for the literal transmigration souls, aka the generations of Jewish immigrants who came from Eastern Europe to the United States.