Richard Pandiscio's Ones To Watch. - Review - book reviews

Interview, Dec, 1999

A CERTAINTY OF IDENTITY "Who hasn't looked in the mirror and asked themselves `Is this really who I was meant to be?'" questions David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl (Viking), due out early next year. The novel is a bold story of love and longing written as movingly and compassionately as any writer could. The foundation of Ebershoff's tale is the life of one Einar Wegener, a man who in 1931 in Dresden, Germany, was the first person in history to undergo a sex-change operation. Ebershoff's fusion of these facts with his own sensibilities as a writer tells a story which is so gentle that there are times when one senses the mere retelling of it is a threat to the emotional delicacy that inspired it. That Ebershoff manages to do this so movingly is a testament to his powers as a storyteller.

Ebershoff's writing is gorgeous; he's deft in the creation of simple visual observations, cinematically cutting between scenes and thoughts, brushing in details that keep the reader in the moment, focusing and lingering over the beauty of a relationship that refuses compromise. And his ability to exploit the fact that both Wegener and his wife, Greta, were painters (many of Greta's paintings, which record Einar's burgeoning life as a woman, survive today) will set many Hollywood honchos' hearts pounding. The fact that this is Ebershoff's first novel is a thing to herald.

Oddly, the media sensation that originally surrounded Wegener's sex change has dissolved from the public's consciousness, eclipsed by an American GI's more celebrated transformation into Christine Jorgensen twenty years later. In the publisher's notes, Ebershoff is quoted as saying, "One could speculate forever why the story was nearly forgotten. Wegener underwent his surgeries in the early '30s, a time of great anxiety in the world.... The dark cloud of economic disaster, fascism, and, eventually, Nazism had already rolled over the continent. It does not surprise me that this story was lost in the horrible events of the subsequent fifteen years.... Yet, of course, another reason is the nature of Wegener's transformation. Even today transgendered people struggle to incorporate themselves into society, without much assistance from most of us."

A collection of short stories by the thirty-year-old Ebershoff (who is also the publishing director of the Modern Library at Random House) called The Dress and Other Stories will be published by Viking in 2001. And the Pasadena, California, native is currently at work on his next novel, entitled Pasadena.

NEW HORIZONS "I'm interested in translating visual stimuli into code," says painter Yeardley Leonard, a thirty-year-old native Virginian now living in New York City. "For the last couple of years I've been working on encoded landscapes." Leonard's "encoded landscapes" strongly resemble Universal Product Codes, otherwise known as "UPCs" or "bar codes," which adorn nearly every commercial product available today. Just as the familiar black bars of a UPC contain information on manufacturing, pricing, and place of origin, Leonard's objective is to encode the emotional and visual presence she feels looking at various landscapes into paintings which can then be scanned, decoded, dissected, interpreted, and ultimately understood. The paintings themselves--clear, colorful--are initially sketched onto the canvas from a photograph, but the many applications of translucent paint that follow are applied freehand, giving an organic feeling to the final geometric layers of the work.

Leonard, who recently returned from a summer spent painting in Monet's garden in Giverny (thanks to an artist-in-residency grant), spoke with me on a day that The New York Times had run a photograph of Washington, D.C., taken from the first orbiting commercial surveillance satellite. This image provided Leonard with a perfect illustration for what she is getting at in her work. "The fact that we are immediately able to decipher an image taken from outer space is unique to our time," she told me. "It's just one of the technological advances that has radically altered the way we see." If Leonard has courage, it's her trust in our ability to comprehend and absorb the myriad forms of encoded information that surround us.