New novel from beloved Ecolint teacher Burt Melnick
We spoke to Dr. Burt Melnick who recently wrote a novel “More Quietly No Doubt Than Many”. It is set in Geneva and Boston, and its young heroine is an Ecolint graduate. It is a variation on the classic girl-meets-boy story and starts on the day of the Swissair Flight accident on 2 September 1998.
True to the title he chose for his novel, Dr. Burt Melnick is very humble and during our discussion, he does not dwell on the details of his impressive career at Ecolint. Many alumni will know Burt or Mr. Melnick, but for those who do not, Burt taught at Ecolint from 1968, after a short tenure at The American College of Switzerland (“a terrible place”) until his retirement in 2006. He held several positions at Ecolint, from English teacher, to head of the English department, to secretary to the staff association and member of the Governing Board.
Even more notable is the role he played in creating the International Baccalaureate programme. Throughout his long career, Burt has influenced numerous alumni. Dr Gene Feder OBE (LGB, 1971) who was part of the first twelve students to receive an IB diploma in 1971, remembers taking this new course mainly to be in the small class taught by the “most interesting teachers”: Bob Leach and Dr. Burt Melnick. And not that there is a competition, but on a recent Facebook thread about favourite teachers, Mr Melnick was often named.
So, when Burt dismissively presents his books as “not very well written” and only interesting to a small portion of people, Ecolint alumni among them, we respectfully disagree. For one, Peter Orange (another teacher identified in the thread mentioned above), who taught Drama at La Grande Boissière, wrote a review of “More Quietly No Doubt Than Many”, specifically highlighting the quality of the language:
“Melnick’s novel travels constantly and well. It is the most brilliant (both senses) summer vacation one can imagine. He paints very well for a writer, I feel. Any reader who has even had the briefest dalliance with any of Jane Austen’s works, will enjoy the style, the characters’ detailed glimpses into the most serious life and death issues and to the most trivial (not to them, of course) of concerns.
(...)
It is a charming, heady, giddy voyage through the “social gatherer” mind where gossip and social relativism trump reality. Language from a bygone era returns in splendid contexts (e.g. “Jamie had been trying, but not too disagreeably, to alchemize that gratitude into something more personal and appetitive.”
Burt, however, is correct on one thing: it will definitely interest Ecolint’s alumni.
“More Quietly No Doubt Than Many” is available on Amazon in electronic form only. (If you don't have a Kindle, you can download the free Kindle app from Amazon.)
N.B.: If you search for the novel via the author's name, you need to type in "B. A. Melnick”.