WordSmith

These sisters, and their female descendants, cannot catch a break. Bad luck in the form of sexual abuse, poor choice of husband and sexual partners, misunderstandings and miscommunications, and so forth. The original two sisters are separated when they are teenagers because of a tragedy, and one of them disappears and stays lost on purpose.

An essential part of the book is the genealogical chart in the beginning – without it, keeping track of the many descendants would be impossible. The chapters skip years and narrators, so careful attention to the details is needed.

Fortunately the characters and their situations are all interesting, and the writing is excellent, so as a reader I was captivated enough to keep track of the complicated events and numerous characters.

Of course, I wanted a happier ending, but I cannot argue with the author’s decisions.

A memoir of the relationship between pianist Anna Goldsworthy and piano teacher Eleonora Sivan. Anna started lessons with Sivan at age 9, and she chronicles the relationship with her teacher and the lessons she learned about music, life, love, and playing the piano. A good read, very true to the the experience of learning a musical tradition.

An excellent novel. Frazier has all the right tools in his arsenal. Nightwoods tells the story of Luce, who inherits her sister’s twin children, after her sister is murdered by her husband. The children witness the murder, and are damaged by the experience and the abuse they suffered at the hands of their father. They don’t speak, they kill chickens, and they start fires. A suspenseful plot pulls the reader along.

The other significant character is the setting, the mountains of western North Carolina and other areas of the South, from the 1960s. Maybe this is why I enjoyed the novel so much – that is the South of my childhood, and it rang true and vivid for me.

Much better, in my opinion, that Frazier’s Cold Mountain or Thirteen Moons. It is violent, but the ending is much more satisfactory than his earlier novels. Highly recommended.

The opposite of the screenplay Amadeus. In this novel Mozart is thoughtful and sensitive, but the the real center of the novel are the four Weber sisters. Mozart befriends all of them, eventually marrying Constanze after being jilted by another. They all played a large part in his early life. Very interesting novel, authentic and entertaining.

An interesting novel, set in the early 18th Century in Venice. The Pieta used female musicians in their choir, orphans and foundlings – virgins, in other words. Vivaldi wrote much of his music for them. The novel follows the life of one o the foundlings as she comes o age and discovers who her parents were. Music plays a large part in the novel.

The best English biography of Clara. Finally answered the question for me of how Robert Schumann died: Tertiary neurosyphillis.

A surprisingly good first novel, a traditional coming-of-age story. Jack is thirteen, and the youngest son of the white-trash Witcher family. As is usual in coming-of-age novels, he begins to see his parents and brother as they really are, makes friends with an adult (a Jewish jeweler) outside the family, and has his first girlfriend and kiss. His brother is also implicated in the murder of his girlfriend’s brother.

It’s told throughout from Jack’s viewpoint, which does wear thin part way through, but the suspense of the mystery pulls us through the rough spots. The ending is satisfying if not unexpected. Overall an excellent novel.

Harold Roux is a minor character in this re-printing of a literary novel from 1974, but he and his hair stand as a symbol for what happens to the major characters. Harold is bald, at 24, and desperately hiding that fact with a bad toupee. He is intent and learning and embracing the finer, higher, things in life, but is assaulted on all sides by the other young WWII veterans at college. Ultimately Harold loses his toupee, and and is violated and assaulted to the point that he flees.

He is a symbol, of course, for what happens to the Catholic virgin freshman Mary, and to some extent all the other characters. The book is a strange mix of novel-within-novel. At the top level is Aaron Benham, writing a novel – “The Hair of Harold Roux”, about Allard Benson, himself a writer and friend of Harold Roux, who is also writing a novel. All these fictional worlds collide and mirror each other. It’s clear that Aaron Benham is chronicling his own life as he writes, which makes the reader wonder if the real author, Thomas Williams, is doing the same with the entire complex construction of stories within stories.

It’s a reprint of a novel that first appeared in 1974 and which won the National Book Award, deservedly brought back to life. Warning: there are some really nasty jokes and smutty incidents – typical of college humor, but which may be highly offensive and shocking to some readers.

The classic biographical novel about Vincent Van Gogh. Stone, in the end note, says that, aside from a few fictional scenes, “… the book is entirely true.” He based his fictional account of Van Gogh’s life on his letters, which were saved by his brother, Theo Van Gogh.

The facts may be true, but there is certainly a spin placed on the interpretation of those facts by the author. The novel spends most of it’s time and energy on Van Gogh’s early life – his failed love affair in England, his attempt to be an Evangelist, his early training as an artist. Throughout he is described as someone who takes a passionate love for something to an extreme.

The most interesting period of his life is his time in the south of France when he first had his “attacks” and when he had his most creative period. Sloan seems to say that Van Gogh’s illness was epilepsy that started late in middle age, exacerbated by the absinthe that he drank and his years of near starvation.

If you’ve seen the excellent movie of the same title based on the book with Kirk Douglas then it’s difficult not to picture Van Gogh as Kirk Douglas or vice versa!

At first I couldn’t decide if this was intended to be drama, satire, or comedy. Now I think it is a clever combination of all three. It’s the story of a white baby raised by black Africans in the Belgian Congo back in the 1950s. It’s told with humor and satire combined with a keen sense of the different cultures – the author is the daughter of missionaries and spent time in the Congo as a child. Well done and insightful.