An Equal Music - Softcover

Seth, Vikram

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753807734 ISBN 13: 9780753807736

Publisher: W&N, 2004

Synopsis

A powerful love story from the author of the international bestseller A SUITABLE BOY

A chance sighting on a bus; a letter which should never have been read; a pianist with a secret that touches the heart of her music . . . AN EQUAL MUSIC is a book about love, about the love of a woman lost and found and lost again; it is a book about music and how the love of music can run like a passionate fugue through a life. It is the story of Michael, of Julia, and of the love that binds them.

'A novel that can stand being reread and reread, but the first time round is an emotional cliffhanger ... secure a copy for yourself, settle down, and prepare for the unforgettable' Sunday Times

About this title

Review:

Michael plays second violin in an up-and-coming Maggiore Quartet, lives on the north side of Hyde Park, takes early morning dips in the Serpentine, has a French girlfriend named Virginie. But his mind is constantly drawn to his first and only love, Julia, whom he knew in Vienna many years earlier. When he catches sight of Julia on a London bus, he cannot help but pursue her. Vikram Seth's new novel is a gently-paced, multi-layered work, proceeding in short sections which flit from Michael's ongoing search for Julia back to his childhood as a Rochdale butcher's son, his early training and breakdown in Vienna under the tyrannical Carl Kall, and the emotional history of his quartet; while Michael's discovery of a Beethoven trio rewritten as a string quintet acts as a motif for Michael's pursuit of the lost Julia: can Michael recapture the magic of the past, like Beethoven, who deafly transfigured what he so many years earlier had hearingly composed? Seth is quite brilliant at conveying the intense and complex interplay of chamber musicians, in rehearsal and performance (an odd, obsessed, introspective, separatist breed), and manages the near-impossible--to write in 1999 about Art and Love without embarrassment. --Alan Stewart

Review:

"Vikram Seth's accomplishment in bringing not only these characters so fully to life, but the rich ambience of the music as well--so difficult to render in words--is something of a miracle."--Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha Praise for A Suitable Boy: "Surrender to this strange, beguiling world and be swept away on the wings of story. . . . It is difficult to imagine that many contemporary writers could give us a novel that provides so much deep satisfaction."--Washington Post Book World

About this edition

• Publisher: W&N
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0753807734
• ISBN 13: 9780753807736
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496