"Novelists either go in for padding or else philosophizing, what we were told to regard as 'generalizations,'chez Balzac." These are the words of an 81-year-old deafspinsternamed Sylvia Winstanley, a recent resident of an "Old Folkery," as she calls her rest home. Winstanley's letters to, variously, "Dr. Barnes," "Julian" and "Mr. Novelist Barnes" comprise "Knowing French," a highlight of this collection of stories by the English writer Julian Barnes. The old lady is a card. She keeps her purse in the refrigerator, deplores badly rolled French R's, boasts of a 1935 trip around the world ("before everything was spoilt"), and admits to having read only one Jane Austen novel, a single Shakespeare play and none of Dickens, Scott or Thackeray. Gide is fine; Proust bores her.

But fannishly reaching out to the "Julian Barnes" of Flaubert's Parrot (1984), a writer she encounters while exhausting authors alphabetized under "A" and "B" in the public library, Winstanley proceeds with unfazed authority. "Whom Is The Novel for, I ask myself," she continues. "In my own case for someone of an undemanding nature who requires to lose herself between about 10 p.m. and bedtime. This may be unsatisfac. for you, I can see," she warns the presumably lofty novelist. With that last disclaimer, Winstanley gets Mr. Barnes the fiction writer instructively wrong. A lover of contemporary and historical detail who disdains padding, a sweeping generalist who avoids generalizations, his lapidary and brilliantly juxtaposed work actually strives to be, for readers with something like Winstanley's intelligent empathy and impatient curiosity, not "unsatisfac." at all. As much as any Dickens scholar or Proust marathonist, she represents a fine example of Barnes' ideal reader.

The Lemon Table is Mr. Barnes' 15th book, an ample oeuvre . With Flaubert's Parrot , which he wrote at 38, Mr. Barnes demonstrated how literary postmodernism could be as lively as the television he once reviewed. Ten of his books are fiction, among them an earlier story collection, Cross Channel (1996). Three of his books are nonfiction, including Letters from London: 1990-1995 , an anthology of New Yorker pieces. He has also translated from the French a short book by Alphonse Daudet, a memoir of his affliction with tertiary syphilis. Like Martin Amis-Mr. Barnes' close friend until a few years ago, when the two writers had a rather public falling out after Mr. Amis changed literary agents-Mr. Barnes is his own man. He works at, as Mr. Amis once put it, a "sophisticated remove" from everyone else. Among well-known others of his now-fiftysomething generation of English writers, Mr. Barnes is less pop and avowedly world-conquering than Mr. Amis, less academic than A.N. Wilson, and showier and sunnier, in his stealthy way, than Ian McEwan.

Mr. Barnes specializes in viewing people, events and moods from unexpected angles, mixing things up in lucid ways. In his unsentimentally egalitarian universe, as evidenced by two different stories here, a retired Royal Air Force deputy executive and the Finnish composer Sibelius carry on the same lightly existential conversations. "Billiards doesn't have to end," says the former R.A.F. man in "The Fruit Cage," someone who in his early 80's leaves his sensible wife (for years, he has referred to her as "the government") to move in with a sixtysomething woman fond of garish eye wear. "A game of billiards could last forever, even if you were losing all the time. I don't like things to end." Sibelius, the statesmanlike artist whose self-regarding voice Mr. Barnes reconstructs in "The Silence," undiplomatically dismisses Wagner: "His gods and heroes," barks the Finn, who hates diluting music with literature, "have made my flesh crawl for fifty years now."

Readers who dislike the narrative interruptions of story collections should know that The Lemon Table is no miscellany of short fictions; because Mr. Barnes customarily plays with form, the collection's cohesive variations will seem scarcely more disjointed, cumulatively, than his novel-writing or essay methods. The stories diverge so sharply in tone and setting, and Mr. Barnes realizes each so completely, that the extreme dissimilarities contrast into a rare coherence. They range from the severe Swedish emotionality of "The Story of Mats Israelson," where Mr. Barnes carves out the plight of a woman "divided between not loving a man who deserved it, and loving one who did not," to the blokey discoveries an Englishman makes throughout his life in "A Short History of Hairdressing," to the artistic raptures of a 60-year-old Turgenev in "The Revival." In this last story, Mr. Barnes defiles a civilized voice that is all hand-kissing and train travel with another, more modern howl that cuts through the lace and club cars with interjections such as: "Hand-kissing! It's perfectly obvious what you really wanted to kiss." This allows Mr. Barnes to hold a colloquy on consummation versus desire, sex versus love-debates that inform the whole book.

The least Barnesian thing you might say is that The Lemon Table -in which almost all of the characters are aging-is "about" old age; the stories are about, instead, how Mr. Barnes imagines various different people find it. Sometimes they don't know. In "Hygiene," a retired military man going on his regimental dinner trip without his wife-and looking forward to his yearly meeting with a prostitute he knows as Babs-glances at the flask of coffee and candy his wife packed for him and wonders, "Were you as young as you felt, or as old as you looked?" As the collection unfolds, the answer to this and other related questions comes to be that no single answer exists.

Mr. Barnes gives Sibelius the last word. The composer wonders how to mark the tempo of "life's final movement." Not "maestoso" ("Few are so lucky"). Not "largo" ("a little too dignified"). Maybe "tempo buffo," with "a drunkard on the podium." But for Sibelius, that's too over-the-top: "No," he concludes, "I have it. Mark it merely sostenuto, and let the conductor make the decision. After all, one may express the truth in more than one way." For Julian Barnes, other generalizations would seem unsatisfac.

James Hunter writes about music and books for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and other publications.

Jean-Philippe and Patou came up with the name Rinôçérôse–which has expanded on stage at home to include as many as 10 musicians–after a painting by a psychiatric patient. "The painting was of these psychedelic rhinoceros [by] this guy [who] couldn't actually spell 'rhinoceros,' which is why he added all of that punctuation as well as the incorrect spelling. We decided to keep it this way because we thought all of the punctuation made it look like the word was trembling," said Jean-Phillipe in the band's press materials.

In their brand of dance music, Jean-Philippe and Patou continue to champion the electric guitar with the enthusiasm of people unsold on the notion that sequencers dethroned the quintessential rock-and-roll instrument. On Installation Sonore , Rinôçérôse offers, with flagrant English in the title, "I Love Ma Guitare.' Atop lazy swirls of blues riffs, a voice croaks: "It's what you call a downbeat, it's what you call a downbeat." This comes before the arrangement gradually abandons its earthiness and swims into more high-tech dance sounds.

Rinôçérôse calls another piece "Rock Classics Volume 1." It also explores a blues-run groove and soulful dance cadences, trying to do in Montpellier with organ and flute passages what Stax Recording Studio bands did, nearly 40 years ago, in Memphis. This retro charm, though, is only part of Installation Sonore ; more often they go at things with a Flaubertian instrumental precision. "La Guitaristic House Organisation" uses short, staccato guitar notes as its chief instrumental hook; around that, Rinôçérôse builds a perfectly calibrated rhythm track that charges around, except when it stops to smell a few psychedelic flowers. But in the middle of the piece, the guitar notes grow longer and more aggressive, building to one of those long, rocketing liftoffs of pure electricity à la Sonic Youth.

Rinôçérôse is, without a doubt, fusion music. But in the end it's fun and pointed instead of esoteric and cute. Jean-Philippe and Patou make an airtight case for themselves as Europe's foremost party therapists.

That's Mr. Allan's chorus, where the melody of songwriters Rivers Rutherford and Houston Robert's well-written song stretches out and relaxes, vaguely but importantly like an old Roy Orbison tune. The narrative action occurs at night. In the first verse, Mr. Allan describes the "flame" of the relationship he once enjoyed as now reduced to so many smoke rings; in the second, he sits on the front steps of the house he's now abandoning and blows them; at the end of the third, he tells the song's addressee-a sleeping woman-that he won't wake her, but will touch her face "and drift away/ Like …" You know.

After two albums, Mr. Allan is trying to be something more than a "hat act," for over a decade a popular Nashville music-industry occupation. Strictly understood, the phrase denotes the wearing by a male country singer of a cowboy hat-even when the country singer does not perform cowboy music, exactly. Yet along the way, the musical achievements of famous hat-wearers like George Strait and Allan Jackson notwithstanding, "hat act" has come to connote a certain flimsiness of artistic intent, a settling for mere radio jingles, for example. And if, like Mr. Allan, you often apply your supple and alert tenor to songs written by others, then the long-term shortcomings of seeming to be a brand of behatted Nashville entertainment construct might seem obvious. Also: George Jones, universally regarded as the greatest living country singer, has shunned hats for over 40 years.

On Smoke Rings in the Dark , the solid album named for his current hit, Mr. Allan wears a hat and manages to emerge not in any way crass. From the sharp retro suit he dons for the cover of his CD to the unencumbered yet tradition-minded ministrations of A-list producers Tony Brown and Mark Wright, Mr. Allan's album seems to care about what a Nashville singer might logically care about, which is country music. On "Don't Tell Mama," a honky-tonk ballad, Mr. Allan sings as someone who gets into an auto accident with the driver of a pickup. When he finds the guy "lying in the grass," the dying driver, as Mr. Allan seems pained to recall, pleads with Mr. Allan's character not to tell his mother that he was drinking. "The last thing on his mind," Mr. Allan sings, "As he left this world behind/ Was knowing someone else's heart would break." No matter how moody, poppy or fancy Mr. Allan can be-and throughout Smoke Rings in the Dark he makes all of these moves well-that song could only have come from Nashville.

The Sounds of Malkovich

The soundtrack to Being John Malkovich is as strange and sensible as fans of director Spike Jonze's recent film about actors and low office ceilings might expect. It begins with Björk, international pop's Icelandic sorceress of emotional surprise and formal contradiction, in a suspended piece of non-English entitled "Amphibian." The music prominently features a harp; it's less beat-happy and liquid than the "Film Mix" of the same song, which provides the album's finale. At the soundtrack's beginning, after Björk, however, there's "Malkovich Masterpiece Remix." The collage, produced by Mr. Jonze and Mario C, snaps bits of dialogue from the film over street rhythms decorated with loungey piano stylings. The sung interjections consist of lingered-over mantra-like words "Malkovich, Malkovich," intoned by the great man himself.

But then, after a passage of Bartok's "Allegro" in the 1995 Cleveland Symphony recording, comes Carter Burwell's score. It's weird propriety in aces. Classical in design, romantic in tone, it's half deliberate movie music rushing to push all the emotional buttons, half scientific inquiry keeping a lofty and disinterested distance. The string playing is super-engaged and gorgeous; the instrumental attacks are ultra-precise. The piano passages lull and sweep, always in fairly modest ways. At one point, Mr. Burwell-who produced and conducted his own score-briefly is heard clueing in his players in rehearsal. He mentions a "high point" at bar 42, explaining that in the scene at hand, the actress Cameron Diaz has just been spit out onto a ditch by the New Jersey Turnpike. One of his players, impulsively enough, hoots. But Mr. Burwell remains unflappable. Like his score.

Just to keep things mysterious, Playing by Heart , it turns out, actually is a soundtrack-"original music," as the package reveals in only a sheepish line on its back cover, "from the motion picture Playing by Heart , the movie written and directed by Willard Carroll, starring Gillian Anderson and Sean Connery." But it doesn't feel like a soundtrack; it just feels like a new recording by Mr. Barry, who composed, conducted and produced this music.

The exceptions are three audio snapshots placed in the sequence, pieces like "Tenderly" and "You Go to My Head" that Mr. Baker recorded in 1956 with a quartet in Paris.

The album, in any event, rocks. Something more interesting than an homage to the languid force of Mr. Baker's West Coast jazz, it is instead a demonstration, keyed to maximum sonic pleasure, of how film scoring borrows other styles to fashion its own epiphanies. Producing Mr. Botti on "Remembering Chet," Mr. Barry isn't afraid to surround the trumpeter's long, highly melodic lines with a synth pad tucked far behind Lee Musiker's piano and Jay Leon Heart's bass; it produces a certain nice, essential shimmer, end of story.

Mr. Barry's Bond scores, after all, remain some of the greatest recordings of the 60's and 70's, because he could always stop the Aston Martin crescendos and spy pulses on a dime and enter a bar to the quieter sounds of light jazz so headspinningly clear and focused you wondered why anyone ever condescended to it as light.

On Playing by Heart that side of Mr. Barry's-he was hot on this world in his Body Heat score-stretches out without ever losing taut lucidity. And Mr. Botti is the right guy to play Chet without exactly copying him. At the end, finally, Mr. Barry goes suavely for broke with "Playing by Heart-Vows Renewed." Here, for almost seven minutes, he coaxes his private jazz into public cinematic gesture-dark-hued harmonics, swelling orchestral flourishes, emotions as big as the Ritz, everything. Mr. Barry, as always, will settle for nothing less.

The defining event of crossover tenordom was 1990's Carreras, Domingo, Pa-varotti: In Concert , the album of a Rome concert by José Carreras, Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti. The multiplatinum release quickly became the "Three Tenors" phenomenon and, marketed under that name, spawned two more releases. The mostly Italian arias on the first Three Tenors album-Mr. Pavarotti's big rendition of Puccini's "Nessun dorma" was the intensely sporting show-stopper-demonstrated something about the whole crossover tenor gig: that the job was not necessarily just madness, but a heroic continuation of the centuries-old Euro-American tradition of stars communicating in operatic style. The unconvinced still heard it as music for tony ice-cream parlors.

Mr. Carreras' most recent offering is entitled Pure Passion ; it follows his earlier best-selling crossover bid, called merely Passion . Throughout most of it, Mr. Carreras trains his flexibility and tightly channeled intensity on transcriptions of melodies and solo passages, probably well known and loved by older listeners, from instrumental music. There are adaptations, outfitted with Italian lyrics, of Chopin's Nocturne in E flat, Tchaikovsky's Marche Slave and even Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto . It's a tack only a naughty crossover tenor might take, absent the extraordinary circumstance of new composition, which is not likely to be the case on Pure Passion . The composers range from Albéniz, Wagner and Schubert to-hold your breath, folks-"Sir Paul McCartney." His piece is entitled "Celebration," a fitfully rousing declaration of love and stability from Standing Stone , his large-scale work for chorus and orchestra.

To talk about crossover tenordom these days, though, is really to talk about one man, and his name is Andrea Bocelli, a bearded Tuscan lawyer who, a while back, switched pretty spectacularly to singing. Mr. Bocelli, who has sold more than 20 million records, broke into the United States in 1997 when his pop album Romanza , culled mostly from two previous Italian releases, appeared here. Early on, PBS championed him. Then a TV commercial for Bellagio Las Vegas Resorts began to play "Con te partirò," Mr. Bocelli's chart-topper, the kind of stirring song on which Italian songwriters and studio guys can put a uniquely torrid bourgeois touch. Two more albums, including Aria: The Opera Album , followed. Recently, Mr. Bocelli topped Barbara Walters' ABC News.com Viewers' Choice list of 1999's most fascinating personalities, ahead of the Clintons, Bill Gates and the late John F. Kennedy Jr.

Sacred Arias , Mr. Bocelli's new album, entered the Billboard charts at No. 31, the highest-debuting classical album in history, according to Mr. Bocelli's label. Sacred Arias , which contains the Ave Maria of Charles Gounod as well as those of Franz Schubert and Giulio Caccini, plus those of versions of "Silent Night" and "Adeste Fideles," is a conscientiously and warmly sung album, performed with the orchestra and chorus of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. It is a strong and logical album, the work of a resourceful Italian pop singer with a universalist turn of mind who studied voice late in life, then applied everything-both the Bellagio and the Beethoven factors-to high-end sacred and seasonal repertoire. The collection shuns cheese, discovering kicks in the vivid, up-close sonics of modern pop recording.

An edge of pop fantasy, however appropriate or not, remains. That's clear when you compare Mr. Bocelli's recordings to those of José Cura, the alternately energetic and lulling Argentine whose recent album is Verismo , recorded with the Philharmonia Orchestra, which Mr. Cura also conducts. It's unfair to compare Mr. Cura with Mr. Bocelli because the former has not come to this kind of work via Italian pop music, with its often intentional confusion of tenors and pop stars. But Mr. Cura, whose singing, sonics and presentation are aggressively operatic for someone even contemplating the idea of crossing over in the United States, puts "Musette! … Testa adorata" (from La Bohème ) up near the top of his collection, before going off strongly into Alfredo Catalani, Francesco Cilea, Pietro Mascagni and others. With Mr. Cura, the notion of the crossover tenor may just be evolving.

Stephin Merritt, a 30-ish Yonkers-born resident of the East Village, pals around with a close-knit group of followers and collaborators, always carrying with him, these days, a Chihuahua named Irving, as in Berlin. Right now, his work inspires sane pop insiders to make enormous claims for him as being just possibly the greatest living American songwriter right now. The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs –all 69 of them written by Mr. Merritt–is the kind of album that can inspire wildly strong allegiances. This happens not only because Mr. Merritt is good, which he is, wickedly; it is because he does something hardly anyone else even attempts right now: He writes songs .

On this new album, a triple CD, Mr. Merritt steps out. Sometimes he is as irony-soaked as Warren Zevon, as miniaturistically brilliant as David Baerwald, as musically omnivorous as Elvis Costello. The songs explore country, drawing-room, electro-pop, new music and cabaret styles, running toward juicy hooks here, elongated melodic passages there, hick chic and gay obsessions and genre jokes. But Mr. Merritt never suffers from any loss of identity. While getting spot-on work here and there from singers like L.D. Beghtol, Dudley Klute, Shirley Simms and his best friend and manager Claudia Gonson, he is always himself.

One of the 69 songs, "A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off," is narrated by a farmer who is a strange hybrid of Mister Green Jeans and Austin Powers. Incorrigibly cool, randy and high-stepping through a quick country-rock beat, the man boasts in a low tenor that his heart behaves like, well, "a chicken with its head cut off." His wife doesn't understand him; "I'm for free love," he explains, "and I'm in free fall."

Another song, "Busby Berkeley Dreams," traipses off into shattering piano nostalgia. In it, a reader of True Romance magazine decries his lover's decision to leave him. In the mind of the narrator, the romance is not over, and he sees himself and his lover dancing through his "Busby Berkeley dreams." In long-lined melodic phrases just upon the point of breaking into soft shrieks, Mr. Merritt gets all Noël Cowardish: "Well, darling," he sings, "you may do your worst/ because you'll have to kill me first."

Still another song–a new-wavish rocker floating on a silken boomerang of a synthesizer riff–is titled "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure." The narrator identifies himself as "just a great composer" (although instantly afterward, in a brilliant touch, a chortling clutch of hand claps undercuts the claim). Saussure pronounces love flatly incomprehensible. This enrages the composer, who, defending the empirical honor of 60's Motown, impulsively shoots the old semiologist. Mr. Merritt sums it up in a neat, cleverly rhymed couplet invoking the names of Motown's greatest songwriting team: "It's well and kosher to say you don't understand/ But this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland!"

Then there's the one about circus performers. Breaking up, the song's panicked narrator argues, would be tantamount to the end of nonstop touring, and velvet ropes, and gainfully employed stagehands–clowns. The song is called "Promises of Eternity," and during the chorus, as declamations of "I can't let this happen to you" and "Don't you let it happen to me" unfurl, you remember the Who's Pete Townshend, years ago, maintaining that Abba's "Knowing Me, Knowing You" amounted to one intense portrayal of domestic love.

Mr. Merritt–who occasionally writes criticism for Time Out New York and, at least on one memorable occasion, torched without mercy a bunch of then-current singles in Details –has all this decade inhabited that bratty little universe of obscure labels, smallish budgets and high I.Q.'s known as indie rock. During the first part of the 90's, indie rock is understood to have unearthed Nirvana, the decade's most lavishly loved rock band by fans and press alike; lately, though, indie rock has returned to the margins of the record business, the home of querulous Americans like the husband-and-wife duo Quasi (now divorced) and rarefied imports like the Scottish band Belle & Sebastian. As best-selling hard rock such as Limp Bizkit has grown so loutish that even Pearl Jam fans can't really hang with it, the outer reaches–as critic Eric Weisbard noted glumly a while back in The New York Times –has gone high-toned and pristine, a stereo lab of sounds and strikingly put notions. Rowdy, that's just for the Limp Bizkit masses.

None of which ever amounted, as one of his characters might put it, to a hill of beans for Mr. Merritt. On the records he previously made under the name the Magnetic Fields–the inverted truck-stop music of The Charm of the Highway Strip and the tweaked Europop of Holiday , both from 1994 are the best known–Mr. Merritt played around with inexpensive, keyboard-based sounds that added up to what might be called a harsh-minded prettiness. Yet sound compelled him nonetheless, and on a 1995 project like Wasps' Nests , his only major-label work to date, Mr. Merritt took a Quincy Jones tack, writing and arranging for indie-rock stars and starlets like Sebadoh's Lou Barlow and the Chicago-based singer-songwriter Barbara Manning. He subsequently made variously witty and slight records with groups with names like Future Bible Heroes and the Gothic Archies. Now, with 69 Love Songs , he is giving his fans and would-be fans a chance to see what he's made of more clearly.

Sometimes, the songs on this gently ambitious album settle into tall-tale mode. In "Papa Was a Rodeo," Mr. Merritt sings, "Papa was a rodeo" and "Mama was a rock-and-roll band." Home, he sings, following along the template of the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rolling Stone," was "anywhere with diesel gas," and love was "a trucker's hand." The couple in the song goes on to enjoy "the romance of the century."

In another song, a funny duet, Ms. Gonson, in her spectacularly lucid and quick-witted soprano, wonders: "Are you out of love with me?" and, a little later, "Do I drive you up a tree?" To which Mr. Merritt replies, "Yeah! Oh, yeah!" the phrase that gives the song its name. The exchange goes on and on, against a guitar speed-jangle the listener comes to want to strangle, and the mix of her interior sadness and exterior hilarity grows deeply unusual, as Mr. Merritt just continues to seem exhausted. It's a real end-of-the-century Honeymooners moment. Several songs later, Mr. Merritt casts Ms. Gonson in the role of the late Duchess of Windsor: "We got so many tchotchkes/ We've practically emptied the Louvre."

Then there's the song about pretending to be bunny rabbits …

"Honey, you are a little lion-wacky," the narrator tells his wife. She answers: "Who has more right to be? Of course I am. But I take lions seriously." This exchange of Tracy-and-Hepburn banter occurs roughly a third of the way through the new Hemingway book billed as a "fictional memoir" by its publishers. The midcentury insouciance is part of a blithe ribbon that intermittently surfaces, floating above a narrative driven by the usual high Hemingway esthetic. Consider these lines, which reveal the book's setting and title: "In Africa, a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable." As folk tromp around in mosquito boots, drink Campari and soda, and listen to hyenas in the distance, both the physical and imaginative worlds of True at First Light shoot for that brand of grandeur.

Some critics, however, have pretty grandly balked. Last fall Joan Didion, who usually doesn't make arguments so much as drive them like Ferraris, maintained in The New Yorker that the appearance of True at First Light , in the scandalous tradition of posthumous Papa productions like The Dangerous Summer (1985) and The Garden of Eden (1986), contradicts Hemingway's well-documented wishes never to have others tamper with and then publish his writing. In her dazzling New York Review of Books deliberations over Monicagate, Ms. Didion relied on Grand Prix cornering skills; here she simply stated: "You care about punctuation or you don't, and Hemingway did.… You think something is in shape to be published or you don't, and Hemingway didn't." A couple of weeks ago in The New York Times , Michiko Kakutani concurred–adding, of course, her constitutional distaste for Hemingway's many and obviously nutty and very dated attitudes. " First Light ," she concluded, "never should have seen the light of day."

Are these objections accurate? To anyone who cares about punctuation in these slipshod days, Ms. Didion's piece was heroic. She and Ms. Kakutani, moreover, are right to argue that True at First Light compares mighty unfavorably with, say, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" or (good Lord) A Farewell to Arms . Even Patrick Hemingway–the author's son, who edited an 850-page manuscript down to a long-seeming 320–doesn't tout True at First Light as an authentic masterpiece. His efforts, he writes, have yielded "a child's teddy bear," presumably something collectable for him and other fans to cling to.

True at First Light is a great, long blowzy affair with moments and passages of mounting beauty and effect. It concerns hunting and women and other places and writers–all considered from the perspective of someone very close in sensibility to our lingering impression of Ernest Hemingway in Papa mode. The narrator is Hemingway, although not a strict autobiographical Hemingway untouched by the selective yet all-changing camouflage of fiction. In the book, he is writing up a storm but not always writing well. The plot is episodic and shifting, nothing especially well-storyboarded, never near the genius level of, say, one of William Faulkner's ecstatic narrative messes. There is drama, although it seems often intentionally undercut, even slightly lampooned. And there is little of the taut poignancy that animates the characters of A Moveable Feast , Hemingway's first "fictional memoir," also published posthumously, three years after his 1961 suicide–but that was a great book, punctuated truly and well.

This crew seems vaporous. They're on safari in Kenya. It's 1953. The narrator has ascended to the position of leader in the party after the recent departure of Pop, his mentor, an older and more august white hunter. The narrator has become the fiancé of Debba, a young African woman who longs to be his first black mate alongside Miss Mary, the Minnesota-born wife he usually calls "kitten." She has stalked a particular black-maned lion for six obsessive months, is keen to find and cut the right Christmas tree, and says, when feeling unwell, ponderously opaque things like "I'm not quite sure whether I'm here or not. It would be nice to find out."

There are others, too: Africans like Mbebia, a cook, Mthuka, a driver, and Ngui, a gun bearer, as well as members of the British administration such as G.C. ("Gin Crazed"), the district's Game Warden, and Willie, a pilot. The threat of violent conflict looms ominously between the Masai, whom the narrator dislikes, and the Wakamba tribes. ("The Wakamba hated the Masai," he outlines, "as rich show-offs protected by the government"; and, earlier, pounding the famously macho Hemingway drum kit: "The Masai had been coddled, preserved, treated with a fear that they should never have inspired and been adored by all the homosexuals … who had worked for the Empire in Kenya or Tanganyika because the men were so beautiful," and so on.) The narrator is sometimes critical and concerned, but more often he feels supremely confident. "I never knew of a morning in Africa," he confesses right away, "when I woke that I was not happy."

Certainly the publishers of True at First Light are putting on a happy face, advertising the link with the July centennial of the author's birth, kicking off a national sales campaign they grandly christen "The Hemingway Century." And indeed, no American writer better fits a marketing strategy entirely clad in Ralph Lauren bush khakis and cooled by whirring Pottery Barn electric desk fans. But what the publishers should have done was make available the whole 850-page elephant, an enormous authentic text for the David Foster Wallace era (hey, maybe throw in a few editor's footnotes).

Hemingway, as Ms. Didion reminds us, would not have appreciated that any better than this. We might be more at home these days with baggy texts of whatever length, but unstitched monsters still trample the sacred precepts of the cult (authored by Hemingway in more ways than one) of the arduously well-written. Reading True at First Light , you think vaguely, "Oh, now he's writing about people eating lion. Now he's writing about treating venereal disease. Now he's wondering how Henry James might have handled this material." It's not unlike clicking through a long and sloppy Web diary, lightly dozing here, coming to with a start there, knowing how much more stuff is on the way, some of it terrific. It's nothing at all like being under the spell of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," entranced as if by literary hypnosis.

Although no rascally adverbs and only a few adjectives litter these sentences, True at First Light is interestingly loose, unworried as it stalks the natural safari profound. It could have been written by a top-notch just-have-a-go novelist instead of ultra-composed Ernest Hemingway. It's more than a little lion-wacky.

Right now, though, with the release of The Best of Os Mutantes: Everything Is Possible! , the label looks impossibly clued in. With this compilation of the Brazilian trio–along with singer-songwriters like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Luaka Bop's own Tom Zé, major players in the currently chic movement from 60's Brazil known as Tropicália–Mr. Byrne's label seems to be in the right thing at the right time.

Just before leaving his Manhattan apartment for another trip to Brazil, Mr. Byrne picked up the phone and spoke about Beck, bubble gum and the perils of being a purist.

New York Observer: North Americans have put different emphases on Brazilian pop over recent years, haven't they? Brazil's music is, after all, enormous and diverse.

David Byrne: It's like one of those diagrams with circles, where part of it overlaps with what is hugely popular in Brazil, and part of it is outside of that, too. So the Brazilians sometimes look at us and scratch their heads and go, "Well, I understand why he loves Caetano–but why does he love Tom Zé?" In a way, it's like all the British bands from the 60's playing Chuck Berry and Little Richard songs. The reaction was the same. "Why do they like that stuff?" Because at the time American radio wasn't playing that stuff. Nobody in America was hearing it. And all of a sudden, all these British bands were coming over and playing American songs back to us. They had hand-picked what they thought was special about American music. More recently, the British and Europeans heard house–disco music, electronic stuff, basically played by Chicago and Detroit and New York deejays and mixers and guys who were creating tracks for clubs–and took it a little further. The originals died out, were no longer played in clubs. And in five years– boom –every club in Europe was playing this stuff, but their own version. They then started reselling it to Americans as house and electronica and everything else. It's the same thing; they hand-picked one little niche of creativity they heard in America and said, "There's something special going on here." Then they took it and ran with it. Although I'm not taking it and running with it, the process is that we're picking Brazilian artists we think have may be something in common, but the choice often ranges over a particular part of Brazilian music; Caetano and Tom Zé and Os Mutantes and some of these other acts all rose to national prominence in Brazil at around the same time.

Observer : During the 60's Tropicália moment.

David Byrne: Yeah. They certainly have that in common. But they've diverged, self-immolated, whatever, each in his own particular fashion.

Observer: Do you hear the 60's counterculture stuff as being the precursor to the current collage esthetic–to, say, Beck?

David Byrne: Oh, absolutely. Not that one is the direct lineage of the other. But it's the same impulse. I've talked to Beck; he's a big fan of Os Mutantes. Not that I would say, "Oh, you're just ripping off these artists." But when you find something that somebody has been doing that has a similar approach to you, you gravitate to it, you listen to it, you go, "They're dealing with the same attitudes and way of working that I do and I want to see how they approach this thing." Plus it's great music.

Observer: Do you think your own attitude toward this music–since you did Brazil Classics 1 in '89–has changed?

David Byrne: Yeah. I've become less of a purist. In the beginning I wanted [he laughs] all the Brazilian music I heard to be played on Brazilian instruments with Brazilian rhythms. And then, gradually, I accepted that, no, you can't be telling people that they can't grab the same tools you're using. You can't impose some kind of exotic criteria on these people. You can't say, "Oh, you have to keep as exotic as I want you to be." You can't do that to people. I find that that's where I've sort of changed.

Observer: One gets the feeling that Caetano Veloso, for example, political considerations aside, is fond of people like Antonio Carlos Jobim and Djavan.

David Byrne: That sounds right. I think what's difficult for us in the North to accept is that somebody can be radical politically, culturally and musically, and yet can still be romantic and love a beautiful, sensuous melody. Caetano can pull that off.

Observer: Velososeems within the Latin American literary tradition of luxury as metaphor–sonic, in this case–for freedom.

David Byrne: Yeah, and I think it comes from the African and indigenous part of Latin American culture, too. You're in this lush environment, where the spirituality is very much about nature and natural forces. You see that as being both terrible and beautiful, and that's part of your upbringing, esthetic and spiritual.

Observer: Is the notion of "the pure" in many Brazilians' frames of reference?

David Byrne: They think of it in slightly different terms. They might say, "Oh, well, if you want to hear Brazilian music, you gotta hear very intelligent and beautiful sambas, but with traditional instrumentation." They're kind of not aspiring to be pop songs, whereas the other stuff, their slick pop productions, even Brazilians might say, "Oh, I don't know if we want to hold that up as being our authentic culture." But it is. It's like slick pop productions are part of the authentic culture of North America, too.

Observer: Veloso sustains an excellent balance of writing for the academy and writing … a hit.

David Byrne: Yeah. He pulls it off. Whereas we see an inherent contradiction in those two worlds, lots of Brazilians don't. They're like, no, you can have your cake and eat it, too; you're not fighting two different worlds, two contradictions. They're all in the same world.

Observer: Sounds good to me.

David Byrne: I went to a club last night and saw a bunch of avant-garde videos and things. I had a great time, but in the end I thought, "You know, this is so accessible. In another context, it would be considered vaudeville." Everything was 10 or 15 minutes long and had some element of humor and was definitely entertaining. But it was nutty, out-there stuff. It's all about the context and the way it's perceived. You know: put Andy Kaufman in an art gallery and it's art. Put him on The Tonight Show and it's comedy.

Observer: Where does that leave us in terms of how world music is presented in this country on record labels?

David Byrne: Ah, man, that's a whole thing. We're going through this time where people are starting to know the artist now. Ten years ago, hardly anybody knew who a Caetano was. Or nobody had heard of Mutantes or Tom Zé or any of these Brazilian artists. Now they start to know them by name. If I mention them at a dinner party or to somebody I'm hanging out with, they don't look at me like, oh, he's showing off, naming somebody we've never heard of. They know who I'm talking about. That's a huge difference, because it means that those people are no longer other–no longer exotic primitives, masks of exotic Brazilians. In world music, these artists are no longer being marketed as makers of this exotic restaurant music, but as artists in their own rights.

Observer: Didn't record companies once believe only exotic collections sold?

David Byrne: Yeah. People found it a little bit intimidating to get to know an artist whose name they could barely pronounce. But if they knew that there was this cool record of Cuban music, that was a start. [He laughs.]

Observer: When you were in Talking Heads, you talked about liking bubble-gum pop. Is there any connection between that kind of purely sonic experience and how you heard Brazilian music? Isn't Brazilian pop, for non-Brazilians, virtually pure sonicism? You're probably not going to know the Portuguese; you may not pore over the translations. It's just going to hit you–like an American pop hit might hit you, like "1-2-3 Red Light" in your case, or Backstreet Boys now. True?

David Byrne: It's true. The first things I heard, I was picking up the melodies, the arrangements, the rhythms, all those elements, before the text. Then I realized that not only were they doing incredible things musically, but the texts were really intelligent as well. They could balance an intelligence, a sentimentality, a romanticism in the text, an intellectual rigor in the text–again, they didn't see a conflict there.

Observer: But then there's some Brazilian stuff that's actually quite horrible.

David Byrne: Oh, yeah. They have all the horrible stuff we have here.

A sometime associate of the Stockholm-based Cheiron Productions, Mr. Martin worked formerly with the late Denniz Pop, known in the United States for his work with Ace of Base. Together, Denniz Pop and Mr. Martin produced early Backstreet Boys tracks like "We've Got It Goin' On" and "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)," one of the group's biggest American hits and a late-90's radio and video classic. Built around aired-out street beats and the sound of girls squealing-plus a descending minor-key bass riff that brands the music the way a logo identifies a pair of jeans-the track might have been mere party fodder, what with the Backstreet Boys encouraging listeners to rock their bodies. But in midjam, the Backstreet Boys stop and pose sad, even poignant questions that mate the anxieties of pop idols with those of, gee, postmodern artists the world over: "Am I original?" one of them innocently sings, his voice seemingly flown in from an old soul record, before going on to wonder, far less interestingly, whether his audience finds him sufficient in other ways. But, is he original -they're kidding, right?

Maybe not. Just as country fans now hear a fresh new thing in the work of Shania Twain and her scarily good producer Robert John (Mutt) Lange, maybe Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears fans-a very young audience who crave an antidote to their parents' rock or neo-soul, or their older brothers and sisters' techno-hear something, yes, original. Mr. Martin's Swedish production style is influenced by Mr. Lange's reductive methods and the music of Abba, international pop's timeless godhead of melodic European grace; it thrives on elimination. For instance, on Ms. Spears' single, ordinary concerns about the facility and beauty of her voice, or the insight and wit of her subject matter, go out the window. "… Baby One More Time" is just an adequately alluring female voice singing about romantic pain, that's all. What makes the record work is the glowing pop structure Mr. Martin encases it in. He slowly and dramatically unveils his plans in a three-minute song that seems to go on longer, arranging suspended piano notes, perfectly meshing background vocals and deafening one-beat accents. What so bothers traditional pop fans is the almost brutal grip Mr. Martin exercises, refusing any move into full-on rock or soul or dance. That means no spontaneous guitar riffing, no swaying choruses and no free grooves. Uh-uh. But that might be exactly what hooks younger fans.

Backstreet Boys was brilliant at delivering department store passion in this kind of studied vacuousness. Sometimes the boys did it by lavishing their voices on blue-ribbon pure-pop tunes like "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)" and the terrific "As Long as You Love Me" as though they were penned by Gustav Mahler-long established in somebody's canon. Other times, they just fired up the musical logos and added more names to the fan club rolls.

On Millennium , Backstreet Boys do more of the latter, further consolidating and refining some of the lushest harmonic pop any male vocal group has ever offered. Oh, there's a touch of old-style "theme" here and there. In "Larger Than Life," the boys actually compliment their fans by seeing them as the icons; the very big, very orchestral, very American "The Perfect Fan" salutes family and motherhood (and even pulls in the Tates Creek High School Choir of Lexington) but keeps it all in the easy-to-understand language of idol and consumer.

What Millennium banks on is the kind of musical rush-undisturbed by text or personal style-that Mr. Martin knows will come out when those kind-of-Spanish-but-kind-of-not acoustic guitars stream around a pretty melody, as on "I Want It That Way," the current single. Or when rhythms and real strings get at least as hot as a Mediterranean afternoon sun in July, as on "Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely." On "It's Gotta Be You," the musical logos-that bass again, but voiced higher-compete with a dynamite Backstreet vocal loop that chants "Baby, baby, it's the way you make me, kinda-make-me-go-crazy," effecting an excellent post-Bach counterpoint. Mr. Lange himself shows up to produce "I Need You Tonight," a version of "Let's Make a Night to Remember," the hot do-me song he helped Bryan Adams make in 1996. The Backstreet Boys restrain themselves, though; they never flatly suggest to the girl, as Mr. Adams did, "let's make out."

But let's leave the post-postmodern and get back to the merely postmodern. Listening to Millennium , you might legitimately wonder: Is there a Robbie Williams in this group? Mr. Williams, who contends he's still young on his new solo outing, The Ego Has Landed (Capitol), a compilation of his previous British albums, sang into the mid-90's with Take That, the now-dissolved English version of Backstreet that mostly failed to excite Americans. Running off and reinventing himself as a literate soccer lad, Mr. Williams now records white soul songs about the psychological aftermath of breaking up ("No Regrets"), occasionally doing the same thing with a rockier twist ("Win Some Lose Some"). He has a somewhat high voice full of idiosyncrasy and delight. Mr. Williams can deliver lines as ineffectual as "Your cool suburban sun …" and wind out the word "cool" like a Ferrari driver reveling in the sound of his own engine. He and his co-writer and producer Guy Chambers rewrite knowing little bits of David Bowie, New Order, Elton John, even a 70's band like Mott the Hoople. So, is he original? (Who cares.)

As it happens, Mr. Williams has a tune, a tremendous one, entitled "Millennium." Whereas the Backstreet Boys are usually careful not to muddy their music with a point of view, Mr. Williams sings about trying to get on in an era that everyone realizes is often full of shit. His idea of cultural hope is to score his big little tune with a glorious orchestral flourish written by John Barry for a 60's James Bond film. At his best, Mr. Williams is a great pop artist. Either that, or he's just another bright 25-year-old.

In England, the boys in Underworld have always recorded not for some swell major but Junior Boy's Own, the brilliant indie label that made key creative hay of the English Acid House movement. Beaucoup Fish (Junior Boy's Own/V2), their third album, appears here on Virgin Records founder Richard Branson's newish BMG-distributed major. Late in 1998, they released J.B.O.: A Retrospective , which successfully demonstrates the label's acumen for club music as sweaty as it is artful, Underworld very much the kings of the sequence. But the trio's preceding two albums-1993's Dubnobasswithmyheadman and 1996's eerily refined Second Toughest in the Infants -made do with U.S. distribution on TVT Records, a New York-based indie that got on the map packaging collections of old TV themes and, later, signed Moby, once thought to be U.S. techno's Elvis-apparent.

The relative mess of Underworld's label history, though, comports with their business-creative modus operandi: Working out of an organization they call Tomato, whose graphic design wing has enjoyed commissions from pop-cult behemoths like Nike, Messrs. Hyde, Smith and Emerson have always pursued their pop music interests just as they have wished, ignoring conventional record company counsel or niceties.

When I spoke to Mr. Hyde shortly after the release of Second Toughest in the Infants , he said that one of the chief things that inspired him about Acid House was its obliviousness to whatever the pop industry and press thought. He "loved that," he said, and valued highly how Acid House tracks, which he said "went straight from the writer to the record-buying public without the middleman," did so minus, as he put it, "any media context to live, to breathe, to proliferate." He found this in sharp contrast to punk, which, he said, acted so independent and rebellious, yet in fact happily slept with rock critics and record executives. A Miles Davis worshipper, Mr. Hyde, now pushing 40, seems to lace his thoroughly 90's technological zeal with a 60's-style iconoclasm. He ended up comparing Tomato, in fact, to the New York saint of 60's do-your-own-thing artistic-commercialism, Andy Warhol. But he also sounded like a latter-day John Cleese who was down with Björk's latest remixers.

"Essentially, I think of myself as a member of Tomato," Mr. Hyde admitted. "And Underworld [as being] a very public wing of Tomato, in the sense that it is an access point for a lot of people to discover the many rooms of Tomato. We're not just an ad company making great adverts. We're not just sculptors or book writers or filmmakers. We're the sum of all these things, which makes us all better for it, I think. You know, the experience of being in each other's companies …" Mr. Hyde finally took a breath. "In a way, it's a bit like Warhol's Factory, without the wackos."

Beaucoup Fish appears after the Great Electronica Hype of 1997, when much of the U.S. pop industry and press-Mr. Hyde, with his low appreciation of both, couldn't have scripted it better-contrived to believe the numbingly literal-minded notion that British-sired 90's techno-pop would take over young American ears. The view was always as wrongheaded as the current one, which is that electronica failed, a conclusion only arrived at if you ever believed in the first place that American radio stations would program round-the-clock beats-per-minute rage.

In fact, a conceptual revolution has occurred with regard to technology among American listeners, who now pick and choose from an ever-widening variety of musical styles. Pop technology now runs everything , not just the velvet-rope disco party of the 70's. Even the abrasive "dance-pop" of the 80's has found its way into the harder world of hip-hop, always so keen on "keeping it real" (consider Puff Daddy sliding David Bowie's "Let's Dance" into one of his jams). It's the plain recognition that, in such an age, music with bleeps, blorps, samples, scratches, synth washes and electronic hiccups, whatever their place in the mix, is as natural as publishing on computers. As Michael Gordon writes in the liner notes to Reich Remixed (Nonesuch), a beautiful collection of artists like Tranquility Bass and Howie B. fooling with bits of compositions by the prescient American composer Steve Reich, "Technology itself is now in an exalted state." That is so true, in fact, that even when someone takes the pure analog route-i.e., Neil Young singing "Sugar Mountain" on stage with only an acoustic guitar for accompaniment-the technology seems conspicuous by its absence.

Turning this notion around-forcing you to hear everything, from rock to cool jazz to soundtrack music to pop hooks to dance beats to odd combinations thereof and beyond, from the naked point of view of the technological-is what Underworld has always attempted. In this regard, jams of theirs like "Cups" or "Jumbo," with its Reich-like use of old tapes of Cajun fishermen marveling over the " beaucoup fish" they might catch, are ur-90's pop. They say: We want you to hear our remix of older styles of music, or of the found music in everyday talk.

Like their previous albums, Beaucoup Fish is plenty brilliant, although perhaps not as surprising as their debut, or as consistently otherworldly as the second album. Underworld doesn't screw around with technology the way U2 or Garbage or Blur have; instead, they seek to perfect something of what technology in its "exalted state" now offers. For Underworld, remixing simply provides more chances to get things right. No better proof of that currently exists than The K & D Sessions (!K7) a collection of remixes of hip-hop and post-techno artists by the Viennese team of Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister, who unveil a spooky command of river-deep soulfulness.

But let's get down to business: Will Underworld sell? "Bruce Lee," which they call a "diversion," could. It's a snappy little number made out of riffs that recall the hooks of many old hip-hop records, and it's at least as catchy as "Born Slippy," the magnetic series of blips and beats and vocal outbursts that found a small place in the sun for itself through the Trainspotting soundtrack. Another possibility might be "King of Snake," which resurrects the famous wall of disco lava that Giorgio Moroder gave Donna Summer on "I Feel Love." Still, Underworld-well, they're a little different. They think they can take over the world by not taking over the world. It's that austere side of theirs. They definitely party like it's 1999. But they can do without the wackos.