On The Bookshelf SPOSITA'S 1 0% OFF RISTORANTE TOTAL FOOD BILL Fine Italian Dining in a Casual Atmosphere OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK! OUR NEW HOURS Monday-Thursday 4pm- lOpm Friday 4pm- 11 pm (MON-THURS. ONLY) PLEASE PRESENT THIS COUPON TO RECEIVE DISCOUNT! Sunday 4pm-9pm British literary suspense novel explores identity, loss, faith and friendship. ONE COUPON PER CUSTOMER • EXPIRES 8/31104 33218 W. 14 Mile Road In Simsbury Plaza Just East of Farmington Road West Bloomfield Saturday 4pm-11pm Musical Mystery Tour SPOS1TA'S RISTORANTE (248) 538-8 954 . 873420 "This subterranean surprise has our vote for the coolest new addition to the downtown landscape." — Hour Magazine, June 2004 NOW HIRINQ. -..ALL POSITIONS! Fine Dining • Authentic Italian) Menu & Atmosphere lusebuct's Ristorante - ammo- Book your next special event with, us! Contact Antonella! ReservatiOns Accepted Appetizers • Insalata • Zuppa Specialty & Traditional Pastas Chicken • Veal • Beef • Fish Live Entertainment Friday er Saturday Nigh Our Personalized Signature Series Large Selection of Fine Wines 248-360-9671 7110 Cooley Lake Road r • Szechuan • Hunan • Chinese •Healthy Diet Dishes Made With No Oil •Brown Rice Upon Request 10% OFF DINNER ONLY Dine-in or Carry-out One coupon per visit. 'eottrite Excluding holidays.,With e="4--- 9--4- coupon. Expires 08/31/04. (248) 353-7890 • 29875 Northwestern In Applegate Square, Between 12 & 13 Mile Roads Southfield 8/13 2004 48 871940 669870 We appreciate your business! SANDEE B RAWARS KY Special to the Jewish News I f Norman Lebrecht's The Song of Names (Anchor; $14) had a soundtrack, it would be the music of Mendelssohn and Bach, mixed with the sounds of Chasidic- niggunim, wordless tunes with a mystical edge, played with passion on a pre- cious 18th-century vio- lin. The novel, recently released in the United States, won last year's Whitbread First Novel Award, one of the major British book prizes. Although Lebrecht pub- lished his first novel at age 54, he was already well known as a journal- ist whose cultural com- mentary and music criti- cism appears regularly in the British press and is heard on the BBC. "Swimming in a double breasted suit against the Monday morning incoming tide, I feel a double misfit," the novel's narrator reflects, passing through a London train station. Reading this first sentence, I was hooked. The Song of Names is a suspense story, a love story, a novel of ideas, traversing the world of music. The main characters are two boys,-one a musical prodigy born in Poland whose parents send him to London in the years before World War II, and the other — who narrates the novel as a grown man — the son of the musical manager who takes him in. Together, they endure the London blitz, turning it to adventure. Dovidl, as the talented young violinist is known, is handsome and self-assured, while Martin is awkward and friendless before the other arrives. They grow to be true friends, closer than brothers, partners in Dovidl's genius. Martin explains, "I was, thanks to him, no longer trapped in mute misery but able to convey my feelings to the world about me, whether it cared to lis- ten or not. I become a vocal Mottl to his effulgent Dovidl, a vital part of a greater organism. And he lived within me like an artificial lung, filling me with confi- dence and contentment when natural organs failed. That's how I thought of him: as part of me." On the evening of Dovidl's high-pro- file debut at Royal Albert Hall, arranged by Martin's father, the young musician disappears. For 40 years, Martin lives with this unsolved mystery, until he hears music played by a young boy that provides a significant clue. To say more of the plot would diminish some of the pleasure of reading this lyrical novel. The book's tide refers to an invention of the Medzhiner rebbe: a list of names of Jews killed by the Nazis, chanted in song, with several melodies, as a lasting memorial to the victims. "Music, these rabbis must have known, clings to the brain like a barnacle. In the aged and confused, it is the faculty that fades last, the final memory," the narrator explains. Time shifts in the novel, from the past to the 1990s, and most chapter names are about time, whether "Time After Time," "Time's Up," "The Time of Our Lives." The sense that time passes, never to be regained, is palpable. Martin recalls, "That's what I lost when the genius left — the mastery of time. Like death, it is a loss that cannot be repaired, a hole in the heart of things." The novel is invested with the author's knowledge of music and of Judaism; it is about the tangled loops between memo- ry, identity, loss, faith, friendship, love, envy and hope. With verbal dazzle and some humor, too, Lebrecht fits together the emotional puzzle pieces. In a Hitchcock-like moment, a journalist named Norman Lebrecht makes a cameo and key appearance in the book. In conversation with this reporter while visiting New York, the author explained that he intended to write a novel for 30 years. When he felt the time was right and finally sat down to write, he had three ideas in mind; this one was the story "that pushed itself to the head of the queue." The assistant editor of the Evening Standard who writes a weekly column