A Death of One’s Own, Gerda Lerner...

A Death of One’s Own, Gerda Lerner (University of Wisconsin). While effective on stage or screen, death, in reality, doesn’t make for a good show. It is slow, surreptitious and, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, ever present, “the way the fruit carries the pit within itself. The children have a small one inside and the grown-ups a big one.” There’s little melodrama or self-pity in this 1978 account of the death of the author’s husband of 33 years, only an extraordinarily personal evocation of her struggle to achieve peace of mind through realism rather than nihilism. Shortly after Carl Lerner enters the hospital, Gerda Lerner becomes “quickly absorbed” in its rhythms, which “turned us into minor actors on (a) crowded stage.” But when Carl’s strength slowly departs, she lives with him for weeks, covered by a plastic bubble over his bed: “I look at my baby, the empty shell . . . which Death so kindly has left me as a little joke.” To the Lerners, however, acceptance of death doesn’t mean submission to it, so Carl Lerner remains on guard, even in a poem he wrote days before his death: “The robbers rob you at night, they steal / an arm, a leg, what / is left . . . with violet eyes / green skin, soundless fingers / they wait at the foot / of the bed . . . ‘til one is tired / then they choose.”

Him With His Foot in His Mouth, (Pocket Books), To Jerusalem and Back (Penguin), Saul Bellow. The former collects short fiction from the 1970s, following the lives of Jewish immigrant children struggling with America as well as touchy, noisy male protagonists, each absorbed in a mission. The latter (also with its fair share of spirited characters) features interviews with Israelis from all levels of society. It is Bellow’s effort to help the international public understand the dilemmas faced by the nation and the people of Israel.

Choices, Liv Ullmann (Bantam). Like the outspoken characters she often plays on stage and screen, Liv Ullmann, in this witty, emotional autobiography, underscores the importance of taking authority over our own lives. She reflects on working in the Third World for UNICEF (we can’t change the world, she acknowledges, but “some traces of all of us are left behind”) on character acting (“I whisper her words and imagine her thoughts”) and on feminism (“Like many women in their 40s, I grew up under strict authority, where choices for the present as well as choices for the future were clearly understood to be choices already decided upon”).

Great Operatic Disasters, Hugh Vicker (St. Martin’s). Hugh Vicker’s witty humor makes it all the more fun to read about the tenor who swallowed his mustache, the live horse that mistook the orchestra pit for a water jump, the opening that was interrupted--permanently--by an eruption of Vesuvius and the continuing foibles in staging “ ‘Tosca,’ by far the most jinxed of operas, as ‘Macbeth’ is in the theatre.”

The Cruise of a Deathtime, Marian Babson; Death in Sheep’s Clothing, Stella Phillips (Walker). Walker’s British mystery series continues with these compositions for a single sitting. Festivities aboard a cruise ship are rudely interrupted in “The Cruise of a Deathtime” after a homicidal maniac sneaks on board, while the sleuths in “Death in Sheep’s Clothing” embark on a leisurely search for the murderer of an antique dealer.

Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, edited by Leonard Stein; translated by Leo Black (University of California). This first paperback appearance of a 1975 digest by Leonard Stein, director of the Schoenberg Institute at USC and Arnold Schoenberg’s former assistant, includes writings on critics and criticism, modern music and folk music and nationalism. Schoenberg, whose work began to be widely appreciated after his death in 1951, traveled to the furthest extreme of German post-romanticism--of Schoenberg’s 1903 symphonic poem “Pelleas und Melisande,” critic Harold Blumenfeld wrote, “overgorgeous, overripe harmonies invite amorphousness and induce a drugged sense of bittersweet anaesthesia”--before abandoning passionate melody, lush harmony and opulent orchestration for the 12-tone system.