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January 12, 2021
Olga Grushin's Playlist for Her Novel "The Charmed Wife"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Olga Grushin's novel The Charmed Wife is a clever and provocative retelling of Cinderella.
Library Journal wrote of the book:
"An absorbing study of marriage, divorce, self, and responsibility, threaded with numerous retold fairytales and rendered in prescient, gorgeous language. Highly recommended."
In her words, here is Olga Grushin's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Charmed Wife:
My musical education was largely accidental in nature, founded as it was on classical Russian pieces always seeping from under the door to my father’s office (along with the furious bursts of his mechanical typewriter and the smoke from his pipe), then supplemented pell-mell by aural vagaries of various roommates and boyfriends once I crossed the ocean to go to college in America. My tastes are eclectic as a result. This, then, is a somewhat odd list. But The Charmed Wife, my fourth novel, is also rather unusual – a genre-bending mix of fantasy and realism that twists familiar fairy tales into unexpected new shapes, then ends in a completely different place (time, paradigm) from where it started. The music I have picked to accompany the story reflects these shifts between times and genres, as well as the dipping and rising of moods – frivolous, disillusioned, dreamlike, and hopeful by turn.
Sara Bareilles, Fairytale (2004)
“The story needs some mending and a better happy ending,” the lyrics go. My novel is a dark examination of “happily ever after” narratives, and this catchy and provocative take on fairy tales, with its juxtaposition of the magical and the mundane (“Cinderella's on her bedroom floor,/ She's got a crush on the guy at the liquor store”), captures the overall subversive spirit of the book. I like the video as well: cardboard decorations are carted about on stage, cheap wigs and neon-colored costumes can’t quite mask the bored expression on the singer’s face, and the submerged rebellion in her voice belies the jaunty pop melody.
Ottorino Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite 3, Movement 1: Italiana (1931)
I first heard these whimsical “airs” as a child in Russia: they were used as soundtrack to the hallucinatory Soviet cartoon of Alice in Wonderland, and so have remained in my mind as a perfect background to scenes of a girl wandering alone through an eerie dream. At the heart of my book is Cinderella, who marries Prince Charming and comes to inhabit a cheerful two-dimensional world of pastel-colored ballrooms with singing teapots and mice dancing to music much like this. But Respighi was a 20th-century composer reinterpreting 16th-century court music, and underneath the lightness, I imagine a sense of distance as well as muted notes of sadness.
Tori Amos, “Silent All These Years,” from her debut album “Little Earthquakes” (1992)
Several years into her palace life, Cinderella has grown unhappy. Her husband is increasingly cold and cruel, and, believing him to be cursed, she labors to break the spell in proper fairy-tale fashion, taking the vow of silence among other trials. “Silent All These Years,” with its enigmatic lyrics and what Amos herself called a “bumble bee piano tinkle,” perfectly conveys the fragile, lonely mood of these chapters. Amos often sings of unhappy, hurt women in search of identity, and this cry of a mermaid trapped in her (possibly abusive) boyfriend’s jeans starts with an especially poignant line: “Excuse me, but can I be you for a while.” Which is quite fitting because my protagonist is rather a blank in the initial stretches of the story – and yet, also fittingly, there is a core of strength in Amos’s vulnerable voice, in the lifting of the music.
Antonio Vivaldi, La Follia, Op. 1, No. 12 (1705), performed by Il Giardino Armonico and Giovanni Antonini
This incredibly beautiful piece starts off light and measured, yet another stately dancing melody, but it soon swells into passionate tumult – and slows down again, and breaks into tumult of piercing strings again, over and over – just like Cinderella’s mood in the later years of her marriage when she tries, she tries so hard, poor thing, to follow the prescribed rhythms of her conventional existence, yet she can’t help feeling things that are turbulent and dark and wild, almost too real for the little cardboard cutout of a princess.
Regina Spektor, “Music Box,” from her album “Begin to Hope” (2006)
“And everyone inside the mechanism
Is yearning to get out
And sing another melody completely.”
I simply couldn’t help including this strange song here. Its dual, jarring nature is such an apt reflection of my book: you think you are listening to (or reading) one thing, a music-box sort of tune, a whimsical fairy-tale retelling – and then, before you know it, it is transformed into something else entirely, something three-dimensional, perhaps playful, perhaps hard and ugly (that tripping, gagging voice that sounds as if it’s being strangled!) – but, in any case, something new. And, of course, it’s perfect thematically: at this point, my fed-up heroine wants to break out of her music-box trap of the palace so badly that she would much rather be washing dishes (and toilets).
Donovan, “Season of the Witch,” from his album “Sunshine Superman” (1966)
“When I look in my window,
So many different people to be …
You’ve got to pick up every stitch.
Must be the season of the witch.”
This wonderful, trippy, moody song lends itself to many interpretations (as do my favorite stories to read, and the stories I myself like to write): some see menace in its lyrics, others find occult references to witchcraft, yet others understand it as a surreal drug experience. All these angles work equally well for the part of the book in which my heroine, sick of quests, sick of keeping silent, sick of weaving magical nettle shirts – sick of herself – abandons the palace for good and runs to the crossroads to meet with a powerful witch whom she will ask for a spell to kill her husband.
Joan Baez, “The Magic Wood,” from her album “Baptism” (1968)
“The wood is full of shining eyes,
The wood is full of creeping feet.”
No fairy tale could be told properly without its heroes venturing into the woods, and so does my Cinderella, the crossroads with its painful choice behind her (but she is Cinderella less and less now, a first-person voice that is growing distinctly real). This song, based on a poem of Henry Treece, whom I have been reading ever since coming across his verses in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, reflects the creepy, frightening, intoxicating magic of the woods like no other I know. Listen to it, then go for a walk in a twilight wood, I dare you. It will haunt you.
Lola Kirke, “Beautiful Dreamer” (2020)
Written around 1864 by American songwriter Stephen Foster, “Beautiful Dreamer” was famously performed by Bing Crosby in the 1940s, and more recently reimagined by Lola Kirke for Lost Girls, a film in which a mother is searching for her missing daughter. In this new version, it ceases to be a sentimental parlor song and becomes a gorgeous, chilling ballad about loss and death. Since my heroine – I will no longer call her Cinderella – has faced a fork in the woods and chosen her new path, her world has begun to open up in surprising ways, becoming rooted in real places and real dates, getting populated with characters from other stories who are often not as they once seemed. This tune can serve as an accompaniment to her Victorian-themed encounter with Sleeping Beauty. Even more so, it shadows her deepening sense of heartbreak – for she has left her two young children behind in the palace.
Sidney Bechet, “I’ve Found a New Baby” (1932)
I can never listen to this without tapping my feet. It’s a perfect tune (along with so many other recordings by Sidney Bechet) for the scene with the Twelve Dancing Princesses who are doing splendidly as Long Island flappers and whose ruinously messy house my heroine, now a tired cleaning lady, tries to keep clutter-free for a brief, chaotic stretch.
Vladimir Vysotsky, “Lukomorye Isn’t There Anymore, or An Anti-Fairytale” (1967)
Vysotsky was a celebrated Soviet bard who wrote frequently subversive lyrics, then performed them in his raspy smoker’s and drinker’s voice. (He died young.) In these parodic couplets, he visits the magical land of Lukomorye from “Ruslan and Liudmila,” a long fairy-tale poem by Pushkin (another celebrated Russian bard who wrote frequently subversive lyrics, and died even younger), and mires it in somber Soviet reality: the ancient oak grove has been chopped down to make coffins, the golden chain of the storytelling cat has been sold for moonshine, the mermaid is pregnant, and so on. My heroine now finds herself firmly placed in the real world of present-day New York, with its real-life problems – rent payments, divorce settlements, custody arrangements – and the mood is earthbound, and at times dark; yet there is laughter through it all, and there is hope.
Anton Bruckner, Symphony No. 4, Third Movement (1874-88), performed by Berlin Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan (1970)
Ultimately, I see my novel as life-affirming, not cynical in the least, and its ending is more unambiguously happy than that of any of my other books. My heroine – and she can finally be called by her real name, Jane – Jane, then, will be reunited with her children and is now walking out of a tired old narrative into freedom, into surprises, into stories entirely new. For the last track, feel free to pick your favorite anthem to freedom, any raw punk rock or heavy metal or classical song that makes you feel as if your world is wide open, full of choices, full of wonders. I myself have considered a few contenders, but in the end, I have settled on the third movement of Bruckner’s romantic Fourth Symphony: there are quiet stretches here, periods of introspection and meditation, alternating with powerful swells of triumph and joy, and the overall mood is one of embracing all the messiness, all the glory of life.
Olga Grushin was born in Moscow and moved to the United States at eighteen. She is the author of three previous novels, Forty Rooms, The Line and The Dream Life of Sukhanov. Her debut, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, earned her a place on Granta's once-a-decade Best Young American Novelists list, and was one of The New York Times' Notable Books of the Year. Both it and The Line were among The Washington Post's Ten Best Books of the Year, and Forty Rooms was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of the Year. Grushin writes in English, and her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives outside Washington, DC, with her two children.
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