I learned to read music at about the same time I learned to read words. I grew up taking piano lessons, studying almost entirely classical pieces that came weighted with history: everything I ever played had been played better by someone else. I still enjoyed my attempts, but realized that the relationship I had with those notes was not the one I wanted to have with words, which I felt drawn to assemble into my own arrangements, my own stories. So, as a weirdo who’s been thinking about interpretation and creation since childhood, I love books that delve into the challenges and emotional complexities of making music.
In 1936, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich is spending every night in a hallway by the elevator, ready for the secret police he’s sure are coming for him. By the end of the novel, he’s publicly celebrated, but the requirements of government approval weigh as heavily on him as government threats. What, both Barnes and Shostakovich himself ask, might his music have been like under different circumstances? “The last questions of a man’s life do not come with any answers; that is their nature. They merely wail in the head, factory sirens in F sharp.” Barnes’s slim, swift novel offers no easy answers as it examines how moral compromise corrodes a life and deforms that life’s work.
A Daily Telegraph / Financial Times / Guardian / Sunday Times / The Times / New Statesman / Observer Book of the Year
'BARNES'S MASTERPIECE.' - OBSERVER
In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.
To play music written in another century and played thousands of times since is to live and play inside infinite comparisons: between the way something sounds in your head, and the clumsier way your fingers deliver it; between your interpretation and a famous recording; between your effort and a classmate’s. In The Loser, Bernhard imagines the lives of two students studying piano alongside a fictional version of the real-life virtuoso Glenn Gould. Their recognition of Gould’s brilliance starts their own lives unravelling. The first-person narrator ruminates and rants without pauses or paragraph breaks, flapping memorably at the edges of the pages like a bird in a cage of its own making.
Thomas Bernhard was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. His formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical, provocative prose is incomparably his own.One of Bernhard's most acclaimed novels, The Loser centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould's incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other-- the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator-- has retreated into obscurity. Written as a monologue in one remarkable…
Selected by Deesha Philyaw as winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Lake Song is set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region. This novel in stories spans decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the…
To portray the title character in Bizet’s Carmenis only one of the many transformations American orphan Lilliet Berne’s life requires, both on and offstage, as she ascends to opera stardom in late 19th century Paris. In this immersive novel, the clothes are as richly described as the music, and the music is described with not only sincere emotion but attention to realities and absurdities: Bizet’s early death leads to greatly improved ticket sales, for example. In Chee’s haunting first novel Edinburgh, he made choral music shimmer with both beauty and horror.The Queen of the Night is very different in setting, time, and sweeping sense of adventure, but shares Chee’s ability to movingly explore acts of survival and reinvention.
'One doesn't so much read it, as one is bewitched by it. Epic, gorgeous, haunting' HANYA YANAGIHARA, author of A Little Life
When it begins, it begins as an opera should begin: in a palace, at a ball, in an encounter with a stranger, who you discover has your fate in his hands . . .
She is Lilliet Berne. And she is the soprano.
1882. One warm autumn evening in Paris, Lilliet is finally offered an original role, though it comes at a price. The part is based on her deepest secret.…
In an unnamed South American country, a Japanese businessman has been lured to a party by the promise of a private performance by an American opera star. As she finishes her last aria, the lights go out and the partygoers are taken hostage by armed guerillas. Working within the claustrophobic confines of a prolonged hostage situation, Patchett acts as a masterful conductor, taking turns highlighting and blending together the voices of characters divided by nation, language, class, power, and more. She brings individual voices into conversation (and sometimes romance) with others, while keeping the whole symphony moving with control and suspense towards the finale.
Winner of The Women's Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
The poignant - and at times very funny - novel from the author of The Dutch House and Commonwealth.
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honour of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxane Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerised the international guests with her singing.
It is a perfect evening - until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves…
Do you freeze up when your characters drift into the bedroom? Are you puzzled about how much to say and how to say it? What to call the body parts that bring us so much pleasure and so much anguish?
If you’re writing a novel and there’s a sexual encounter…
This multigenerational saga leaps across decades and continents, from the life of a Chinese-Canadian girl growing up in Vancouver in the 1990s, to the horrors of WWII and the Cultural Revolution in China, when Western classical music was banned. The role of music in the book is complex: it can be both passion and livelihood, private beauty, or blunt political instrument. When love for music can threaten someone's physical survival, a “pretty” piece of piano music is anything but: the notes “drip down to the parlour, seeping like rainwater over the persimmons on the table, the winter coats of her family, and the placid softness of Chairman Mao’s face in the grey portrait frame on the wall.”
"In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old."
Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations-those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers…
Erik Satie begins life with every possible advantage. But after the dual blows of his mother's early death and his father's breakdown upend his childhood, Erik and his younger siblings -- Louise and Conrad -- are scattered. Later, as an ambitious young composer, Erik flings himself into the Parisian art scene, aiming for greatness but achieving only notoriety.
As the decades pass, he alienates his circle as often as he inspires them. Only Louise and Conrad are steadfast allies. Together they strive to maintain faith in their brother's talent. But on a journey that will take her from Normandy to Paris to Argentina, Louise is rocked by a severe loss that ultimately forces her into a reckoning with how Erik will never be the brother she's wished for.
