‘Music for Wartime’: Workshop faculty member pens must-read story collection

Every now and again, a book strikes me as so nearly perfect that I struggle with how best to express my admiration. 'Music for Wartime,” Rebecca Makkai's new short story collection, is such a book.

Makkai, who is currently a visiting faculty member in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has penned a collection filled with beauty and heartbreak, surprise and wonder, guilt and innocence. Composed over 13 years, the stories complement one another perfectly, linked not by characters or plot, but by theme and craft.

Makkai has a gift for revealing an essential detail at the ideal moment, often changing the reader's understanding of a tale quite late in the telling. This patience and sense of timing provides many of the collection's most effective moments. When, for example, we learn a key detail of a reverend's past in 'The Miracle Years of Little Fork,” we gain a new empathy for him - an empathy Makkai exploits to devastating effect in the story's closing passages.

Haunting the stories are details from Makkai's own family heritage, some of which are revealed in three 'legends” - presented as tales about her family passed down through the generations - sprinkled throughout the book. The awful events in Hungary in the years before and during World War II underpin many of the stories.

Here, for example, a woman who has had her romantic hopes cruelly dashed reflects on a lasting romance between a Jewish woman and a soldier who saves her - but not her sister - from death:

'It wasn't quite true, she knew, that there was nothing for her in Zsuzsi's story. The woman had managed - not just eventually, but right there on the spot in 1944 - to forgive the most heinous acts of her lifetime, all for the sake of love. Or at least self-preservation. And here was Melanie, who knew that the rest of her life would be defined by the degree to which she could forgive Michael. This was the role of the survivor as well: the passing of judgment, the issuing of pardons.”

'Music for Wartime” is an exceptional book that I simply cannot recommend enthusiastically enough.

Book reading

What: Rebecca Makkai reads from 'Music for Wartime”

Where: Prairie Lights Bookstore, 15 S. Dubuque Street, Iowa City

When: 7 p.m. Sept. 21

Cost: Free

Extra: Makkai also will participate in the Iowa City Book Festival, at 1 p.m. Oct. 3 at the Old Capitol Senate Chamber, Iowa City