05.25.08

A String-themed Novel Wishlist

Posted in Bookish Wish Lists at 7:49 pm by Miracle ♪♫

The Song of Names
Norman Lebrecht
Two boys are growing up in wartime London. Martin is an only child, imprisoned in swottish loneliness. Then Dovidl enters his home, a refugee violinist from Warsaw. ‘I am genius,’ says Dovidl. ‘You have information. Together we make good team.’ His arrival brings merriment and love, mischief and menace. Blood-brothers, they roam the ruined city, finding tragedy and triumph. It is the time of their lives, their finest hour. Then Dovidl disappears, on the afternoon of his international debut. Martin is broken-hearted, his father near-bankrupted, the police dumbfounded. Where has he gone? How can a genius escape his date with destiny? How could he betray a brother? Martin is condemned to forty years of humdrum half-life until, one wintry night, an unexpected musical clue sets him on the trail to an astonishing act of self-discovery, and renewal.

Antonietta
John Hersey
A saga of a magnificent violin, Antonietta, named after a beautiful woman who was the inspiration of Antonio Stradivari’s later years. As Hersey brings Mozart, Berlioz, and Stravinsky to life, he offers us a marvelous celebration of the changing character and eternal art and
power of music.

Canone Inverso
Paolo Maurensig
Canone Inverso has the structure and resonance of an intricate piece of music, leading up to a devastating finale. A strangely carved, beautiful violin accompanies two generations of artists from Hungary, torn by World War I, to Vienna awaiting the Nazi Anschluss. Mysteriously, the violin reappears in an auction at Christie’s in present-day London. the story centers on two friends: a bastard peasant boy burdened with a great talent and the only heir to an Austrian aristocratic family desperately clinging to the prerogatives of noble birth. Theirs is the age-old tale of the doppelganger re-imagined: companions, perhaps brothers, and, inevitably, lethal enemies. The lives of the main characters intertwine in a mysterious and magical fugue, in which music is at once threat and consolation. Immortality, history, and an all-consuming passion come to play in this artfully layered, erudite narrative. Maurensig’s sensuous prose brings to life an age, an art, and the spirit of music.

The End of Romance
Norma Barzman
“The End of Romance” is a riveting memoir set against the backdrop of the rise of the Red Brigades and the resurgence of fascism in Italy. In 1973, Norma Barzman, a blacklisted screenwriter living in southern France, travels to Cremona with her husband, Henry Myers, the writer of the legendary Marlene Dietrich/James Stewart movie. Henry, a natural bon vivant and the love of Norma’s life, is nursing his diminished talent in deathly isolation in New York. Their adventure opens a Pandora’s box of long-suppressed emotions, and forces each to reassess their feelings towards the other.

The Cellist of Sarajevo
Steven Galloway
Snipers in the hills overlook half the intersections in Sarajevo. In the streets below, two inhabitants, Dragan and Kenan, trapped, like all their neighbours, in the city, strive to go about their daily lives, trying to second guess when and where the next bullet will strike. One man, a cellist, defies this game of ‘Sarajevo Roulette’; in memory of the city’s dead, for 22 consecutive days, he becomes a sitting target as he plays Albinoni’s ‘Adagio’ in the street outside his building. Unbeknown to him, one young woman watches his performances with unflinching attention. Tense and heart-wrenching to its last page, “The Cellist of Sarajevo” shows how life under siege creates agonizing and almost impossible choices. When the mere act of crossing the street can risk lives, the human spirit is revealed in all its fortitude - and frailty.

Overture
Yael Goldstein
A beautifully written, strikingly accomplished debut novel about love, music, and the complex relationship between mothers and daughters —at once a captivating glimpse into lives lived passionately and a subtle exploration of the nature of genius… Natasha Darsky is “the most famous violinist since Paganini.” Bow in hand, she lights an erotic fire under every piece of music she plays, telling each composer’s story in a singularly sensuous way. The daughter of a world-renowned art dealer in New York City, Natasha grows up in a world where artistic achievement is accorded the highest value, and her father’s opinion determines the rise and the fall of many an artist. Her prodigious musical talent, discovered when she is a little girl, blossoms at Harvard, where she begins to pursue composition as well as performing. She is soon involved in a passionate love affair with Jean Paul, a young composer whose innovative music is hailed as revolutionary. Under Jean Paul’s shadow, Natasha abandons her dream of writing music of her own and turns toward performance. Channeling the frustration and muted fury of this choice into her playing, she creates a sexually charged sound that packs concert halls around the world year after year. Her young daughter, Alex, follows in her celebrated footsteps, but it is Alex’s talent as a composer that brings mother and daughter together—and tears them apart in ways Natasha could hardly have anticipated. Overture draws readers into the glamorous and competitive world of classical music, capturing its harsh demands and its magical power to move performers and audiences alike. With a mastery rare in a first-time novelist, Yael Goldstein offers a fascinating meditation on the nature of creative brilliance and on the love that binds a mother and daughter even when their personal desires clash.

The Soloist
Mark Salzman
From the opening anecdote about a sixteenth century
saint who apparently suffered from a “neurological disorder known to cause hallucinations,” The Soloist captures and retains its reader’s attention and imagination until its final words. The story revolves around a faded musical prodigy, Renne, who has lost the ability of his childhood to perform as a world-class cellist. His life falls into a daily grind of tedious lessons with his uninspired and uninspiring students. Two separate occurrences serve to oil the wheels of his sparse existence: a new student emerges who shows the same spark of brilliance Renne himself exhibited as a child, and a summons arrives for him to serve as a juror in a trial involving the brutal murder of a Buddhist monk.

The Savior
Eugene Drucker
A magnetic debut novel from world-renowned violinist Eugene Drucker Set during the final weeks of World War II, The Savior is the story of Gottfried Keller, a young German violinist. Exempted from military service, Keller is burdened with the demoralizing task of playing for
wounded soldiers in hospitals and makeshift infirmaries. As he leaves his apartment one morning to pick up a new assignment at headquarters, Keller finds an SS driver waiting for him and is escorted without explanation to a labor camp outside his town. There he is introduced to
the camp’s Kommandant, who tells Keller that he will spend the next
four days performing for the inmates as part of an experiment in
reviving hope in those who have lost it completely. Overwhelmed by fear
and compelled by the temptation of using his talent to affect others so
powerfully, Keller finds himself playing a series of concerts for the
prisoners — and seeing with his own eyes the horrifying truths within
the barbed-wire fence. As he plays the music of Ysaye, Hindemith and
Bach, most notably the searing Chaconne, Keller’s own questionable past
unfolds, revealing the loss of his closest friend and the Jewish
fiancée from whom he fled in fear of being caught as a Jew-lover. As he
bears witness to the camp’s atrocities, Keller’s horror toward the
perpetrators and their crime begins to fade, revealing his own
culpability. Beautifully conceived and gracefully written, The Savior
is a complex and illuminating character study of a man severed from his
past expectations and an artist struggling with his identity in the
face of human catastrophe.

Black Violin
Maxence Fermine
It is 1797 and Napoleon’s Army has entered Venice. Among them is one Johannes Karelsky, a violinist. For now he is a soldier, but his ambition is to write the most beautiful opera ever written. He finds himself billeted with an old man called Erasmus, a violin-maker. One evening, Erasmus decides to tell Johannes the story of his life. And settling into his favourite armchair, with a glass of grappa in his hands, he begins his tale. The tale of the black violin.

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