Living With Music: A Playlist by A.M. Homes

On Wednesdays, this blog is the delivery vehicle for “Living With Music,” a playlist of songs from a writer or some other kind of book-world personage. This week: The novelist A.M. Homes, whose most recent book is “The Mistress’s Daughter,” a memoir.

A.M. Homes’s March 2008 Playlist:

In retrospect and with the endless impulse toward revision, I look at this list thinking it’s all about sex and longing and metaphysical impossibility and the hand of god - and is there anything else? Is there something more - I expect nothing less.

1) Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne as sung by Peter Gabriel on “Tower Of Song.” A mysterious, erotic incantation that begins with shuffling drums, scratching wire brushes sweeping the snare, scratching, itching, writhing with the impossibility of it all. It’s endlessly inspiring for its romanticism, longing and applicability to any object of desire, the elusive that can never really be. I think of the ethereal Suzanne as she’s sung to us, “she brings you tea and oranges that come all the way from china,” and the reality of the “real” Suzanne, now frozen in lost time with a permanent view of the St. Lawrence River. Somehow always in my mind’s eye I had placed her in Greece, in Hydra with Cohen, but maybe I just made that up, maybe that was the next Suzanne for as unpossessible as she was or is, there is always another Suzanne. (...)

By Dwight Garner