"Sing to Me"

Jesse Browner is the author of the novels The Uncertain Hour and Everything Happens Today, among others, as well as of the memoir How Did I Get Here?

He is also the translator of works by Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Matthieu Ricard and other French literary masters. He lives in New York City.

Browner applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Sing to Me, and reported the following:

On page 69 of Sing to Me, my young protagonist is wandering the streets of a deserted city that has recently been sacked and looted. He’s wearing a helmet he has found in the rubble when he stops to look at his reflection in the basin of a fountain. He reflects about the man who lost it. He marvels that his own brain now occupies the very space that was occupied by someone else’s brain only a few days previously, and wonders whether any of that man’s thoughts have left traces of themselves in the helmet.

This passage provides an excellent sense of what the book is about, many of its principal themes and a powerful insight into my protagonist’s psyche. The ravages of war, the vulnerability of children in times of conflict, the clear-eyed honesty of a child’s assessment of human cruelty and frailty, the enduring capacity for wonder – all are touched on in this brief passage. “How many helmets are out there right now, buzzing with the thoughts of dead people in their own language, while their families, maybe thousands of leagues away, believe or hope they are still alive?”

Because my protagonist is alone for much of the novel, we are necessarily inside his head for most of that time, so by this point the reader has become used to the meandering, digressive and irrepressibly curious rhythms of his thoughts. Those, too, are highlighted to good effect on this page. He is a young boy from an isolated farming community, so as he drifts through the post-apocalyptic devastation of the ruined city, everything he sees and every reaction to his experiences is new to him and forces him to try to make some sort of sense of the incomprehensible.

What he doesn’t know, and what the novel never explicitly spells out, is that he happens to be wandering through the aftermath of one of the most storied and consequential wars in the history of Western civilization. He has no sense of who was fighting whom, why they despised each other or the background of their dispute. As a child, all he knows is what he sees; the rage and violence of great warriors and feuding gods, the enmities between empires and the lure of pillaged treasure have no meaning for him. He sees right through them to the stark truth underlying the history of nations.

Writers Read: Jesse Browner (January 2012).

Writers Read: Jesse Browner.

Q&A with Jesse Browner.

--Marshal Zeringue