Love

Find Me      André Aciman     (2019)

In 2007,  André Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name broke new ground for love stories in presenting the relationship between a teenaged Elio and graduate student Oliver, who was the houseguest of Elio’s professor father in a small Italian town. Elio—preternaturally brilliant, a gifted pianist—is smitten by Oliver, who is handsome, worldly, and similarly brilliant. The language in Call Me by Your Name is lush and erudite; the story is heartbreaking.

In 2019, Aciman’s Find Me revisits the lives of Elio, Elio’s father, and Oliver years later; you can read it as a sequel to Call Me by Your Name or as a standalone novel. There are three sections to Find Me. “Tempo” tells about Elio’s father, Sami, meeting a much younger woman, Miranda, on a train rumbling south from Florence to Rome. In the “Cadenza” section, an adult Elio meets the much older Michel in Paris. Finally, in “Capriccio,” we catch up with Oliver, who’s been living on the East Coast of the United States.

You’ll like reading Find Me if you like

• Honest and incisive dialogue that drives the plot. Here is Elio talking to Sami: “You taught me how to love—how to love books, music, beautiful ideas, people, pleasure, even myself. Better yet you taught me that we have one life only and that time is always stacked against us.” (112)

• Wise aphorisms that stop you in your tracks. Two examples: “Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope.” (238)  “Sometimes it’s best to stop things when they’re perfect rather than race on and watch them sour.” (136)

• Descriptions that go beyond window-dressing to probe character: “Miranda put down her fork and lit a cigarette. I watched her shake the match with a decisive hand motion before dropping it into an ashtray. How strong and invulnerable she suddenly seemed. She was showing her other side, the one that makes hasty indictments, then shuts them off and never lets them back in except when she weakens, only to hold it against them that she did. Men were like matches: they caught fire and were shaken off and dropped in the first ashtray that came her way.” (42)  Oh, here’s another: I liked her slim feet, and her smooth shoulders gleaming with a summer’s tan that seemed to resent letting the scent of last weekend’s sunscreen wear off. Above all I liked her forehead, which was not flat but rounded and which hinted at thoughts I couldn’t put into words but wanted to know better, because there was a wry afterthought visibly floating on her features every time she flashed a smile. (219)

• Plots that turn on deep and profound love, both gay and straight.

I found the third section of Find Me, Oliver’s story, occasionally confusing, so I had to slow down in my reading race to see how the plot resolved. Savor this one, readers.

Two Novels about Musicians

Love Is Blind:  The Rapture of Brodie Moncur     William Boyd     (2018)

Brodie Moncur was born with perfect pitch, and this is his ticket out of the grasp of his alcoholic father and repressive family situation in rural Scotland in the 1890s. Brodie’s superb piano-tuning abilities take him to a shop in Paris, where he suggests an endorsement scheme to help sell pianos. This is how he comes to be the tuner for concert pianist John Kilbarron. Brodie travels around the European continent in Kilbarron’s entourage and falls in love with Kilbarron’s mistress, the elusive Russian soprano Lika Blum. Difficulties result.  

Keep the title of this novel in mind: Brodie is blind to all the danger that his head-over-heels passion draws him into. I was on tenterhooks with worry about his affair with Lika being discovered, and I got fully immersed in the melodrama of the great but erratic and fading pianist Kilbarron and Kilbarron’s slimily malevolent brother, Malachi. Flitting from city to city, the fin de siècle characters inhabit sites deftly conjured with only a few broad strokes of description by the novelist. In each locale they create great music or make love or evade discovery, always seeming very much of their era.

The writing here is lyrical and effortless, sweeping the reader along and creating sympathy for Brodie’s plight. Late in the novel he ruminates: “It was astonishing how quickly life could change, how the ground moved beneath you and the landscape you thought you were living in turned out to be entirely different. Like waking up after an earthquake.” (303)

The weaknesses of Boyd’s story lie in the failure to develop fully the tantalizing story line about Brodie’s family and the lack of substance in the depiction of Lika. Even acknowledging these faults, Love Is Blind is a solid read.

The Ensemble     Aja Gabel     (2018)

Playing in a high-powered string quartet is challenging to the body as well as to the mind; the personal interactions of the four musicians, both on stage and off, are also a part of the mix. Novelist Aja Gabel, described on the dust jacket as “a former cellist,” has an insider’s understanding of the musical details as well as of the relationships involved in chamber music performance.

She introduces readers to the fictional Van Ness Quartet: Jana (hard-driving first violinist), Brit (reserved second violinist), Henry (note-perfect violist), and Daniel (unhappy cellist). If you played in your high school orchestra or if you’ve sung in a choral group or if you’ve collected all three of Yo-Yo Ma’s recordings of the Bach “Cello Suites,” you may appreciate the many musical insights about performances of the quartet. If you know little about classical music, you’ll miss some of the subtleties about the rehearsals and performances of the quartet, but you can still enjoy the plot and the very good character development of this novel.

For my review of another novel about a musician, click here.

Sonata II: A Czech Musical Quest

 The Prague Sonata     Bradford Morrow     (2017)

“Sonata” is the theme for this Bradford Morrow novel as well as for the novel I reviewed in a recent post, Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata. Yet these two books are totally different in style and plot. 

The Prague Sonata centers on a fictional manuscript of a musical work from the late eighteenth century. Meta Taverner, a musicologist in New York City in the year 2000, is given one of the three movements of this unknown piano sonata by an elderly Czech woman who then promptly dies. Meta sets out on a mission, starting in the Czech Republic, to locate the remaining two movements of the sonata and to determine its composer.

The Prague Sonata is an amalgam of quest and mystery novel. There’s also a good chunk of historical fiction, as we travel back to Prague in the days before and during World War II to meet the woman who separated the three movements of the sonata in the face of the arrival of Nazi troops. Morrow explores the connections between the twentieth-century Czech owner of the manuscript and the twenty-first-century sonata seeker: “Had Meta herself been bequeathed a handwritten sonata from a fond, eccentric father, would she have had the guts and the wisdom to split it into three orphaned movements in hopes of protecting it from the enemy?” (70)

Classical musicians and lovers of classical music (among whom I count myself) will find much to enjoy in The Prague Sonata, which includes details of musical notation and rhapsodic descriptions of performances of the mysterious sonata. Trooping through the streets of Prague with Meta, I became genuinely interested in how the movements of the sonata might be reunited and how the composer might be ascertained. Occasionally, however, Morrow’s musical metaphors become strained:  “Despite her doubts about love at first sight . . . they’d been improvising a duet on either side of the river. A duet that wanted to evolve into a fugue. One whose harmonic and rhythmic structures moved toward the same resolution.” (231)

Morrow also wants to tell us a lot about Czech history, not only from the World War II era but also from the time of the Velvet Revolution against the Soviets in 1989. If these and other background paragraphs had been edited down, the pace of the novel would have picked up. A romance component does add spark to the narrative. Meta’s lawyer boyfriend, who remains behind in New York, is unsympathetic to her quest in the Czech Republic, leaving her open to forming a new relationship. I won’t reveal spoilers!

Late in The Prague Sonata a character brings up Willa Cather’s 1918 novel My Ántonia, arguably the best fictional depiction of Czech immigrants (called “Bohemians”) in the United States: “’This was written years ago, but the heartland of Nebraska and the Bohemians who settled there haven’t changed all that much. Time kind of stands still on the prairie.’” (385-6) I read My Ántonia recently and found this American classic to be surprisingly nuanced. Between My Ántonia and The Prague Sonata you can get a sense of the richness of Czech culture.

Sonata I: The Swiss Character

The Gustav Sonata     Rose Tremain     (2016)

The setting is Switzerland after World War II and, in flashbacks, before World War II. Author Rose Tremain delves into the traditional stereotypes of Swiss character as well as the fraught issue of Swiss neutrality in the face of Nazi aggression.

With exceptionally spare prose, Tremain propels along the story of Gustav Perle; his widowed mother, Emilie; and his best friend, Anton Zweibel. The novel opens in 1947, when Gustav is five years old, and we learn immediately that Emilie is a harsh taskmaster to Gustav: “He never cried. He could often feel a cry trying to come up from his heart, but he always forced it down. Because this was how Emilie had told him to behave in the world. He had to master himself. “ (4)

Gustav’s life changes the day in 1948 when his kindergarten teacher assigns him as mentor to a new student, Anton, a piano prodigy from an exuberant and friendly Jewish family. Emilie is wary of the boys’ budding friendship: “’The Jews are the people your father died trying to save.’” (17) Well, as we’ll learn later in the novel, that isn’t exactly what happened during the war.

The story of the death of Gustav’s father is complicated, but his involvement with Jewish refugees in the early days of the war was perhaps partly inspired by the true story of a Swiss police officer who broke the law by aiding Jews. The closing of the Swiss borders to Jews in 1938 sent many to concentration camps and gas chambers. I don’t think that it’s accidental that The Gustav Sonata has been published when Europe is once again facing a refugee crisis with profound humanitarian and political implications.

Beyond this back story about Gustav’s father, the novel moves forward in time to the 1990s, when Gustav and Anton are both middle-aged. Gustav is the owner of a small hotel in his home town of Matzlingen. Anton, who could not survive the performance pressures of being a concert pianist, is a music teacher in the same place. One final crisis leads to the resolution of the plot, much as a final cadence ends a musical composition.

In my husband’s family there’s a phrase that’s used to describe the mindset of his Swiss ancestors: “Alles ist in bester Ordnung.”  The literal translation is “Everything is in the best order,” but the underlying message is that the Swiss have a passion for orderliness, for precision, for suppressing conflict and emotion, sometimes to the detriment of human kindness. Gustav, in particular, seems to conform to this Swiss stereotype, but Tremain’s novel shows us how he eventually breaks free.

For another novel that has “sonata” in the title, though with a very different tone and setting, check out my review next Friday!