The Unwritten Music Of Life - Softcover

Armenteros, Jorge

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1963908910 ISBN 13: 9781963908916

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2025

Synopsis

In The Unwritten Music of Life, music and silence divine memory. Armenteros’s synesthetic maelstrom becomes both voice and metaphor. A classical composer, Nicanor, finds himself in search of missing notes. Neva, violinist/muse, may have a clue. Their languid narratives (respectively 1st and 2nd person) obliquely reveal childhood specters and their own enigmatic relationship. This is a ‘large’ book, a joy to read, and worthy of much contemplation. The prose is lucid and often poetic. There’s mystery, animation, and quest; a right amount of magical realism, veiled eroticism, anomie and much personification. A refrain, “nothing and everything”, nods to Sartre. Perhaps most salient, Armenteros, who happens to be a psychiatrist, offers an exquisitely sustained portrayal of mind. He evinces music’s direct access to the unconscious. Ultimately, Neva’s electrifying improvisations (like psychoanalytic free-association?) afford her a kind of peace with the past that Nicanor may then reach for.
Lauri Robertson, author of ...& Tremolos

Like Kieslowski’s film Blue, Jorge Armenteros’s novel The Unwritten Music of Life speaks directly to music’s mysterious core. In the debate between absolute music, in which music can only be understood based on music itself and maintains its elegant stance in the ineffable, and program music, in which “literary” dilutions suggest that music can be paraphrased in words and translated into narrative and symbol, absolute music wins. And yet: because of listening closely to “Composition No. 33”, a narrative between a composer and a violinist, between a woman, a river, Prague and Cuba, past, present and future emerges here in clear, concise elegant language. It only happens in the moment. “I am starting to think that the soul of sounds cannot be recorded.” Armenteros›s novel is one that rewards the closest of readings.
Leonard Schwartz, author of Actualities

About this title

About the Author

Jorge Armenteros was born in Cuba, his family leaving for Madrid, Spain, then Tampa, Florida, before finally settling in Puerto Rico. After graduating cum laude from Harvard University, he acquired an MD at the University of Puerto Rico, an MA in Spanish and Latin American Literature at New York University, and an MFA in Creative Writing at Lesley University. Armenteros is the author of the 2015 International Latino Book Award winner The Book of I (Jaded Ibis Press), and The Striped Tunic Trilogy (Spuyten Duyvil Press). Armenteros resides in the South of France.

Edition details

• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1963908910
• ISBN 13: 9781963908916
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232