THE SPANISH BOW

The fiction debut by journalist Romano-Lax (Searching for Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez: A Makeshift Expedition Along Baja’s Desert Coast, 2002) is a sprawling historical novel about a cello virtuoso who, over a 75-year career, finds himself embroiled in all the great political and artistic convulsions of 20th-century Europe.

Feliu Delargo is born in a Catalan backwater in 1892. Soon afterward, his father, a customs official, is killed in a fire abroad. He bequeaths his children a few prized objects, and Feliu chooses as his remembrance and his destiny a glossy cello bow. For eight decades, Feliu and the bow are never parted. After long tutelage, Feliu teams up with the man who was his first idol and benefactor, piano prodigy Al-Cerraz, and their bickering friendship and collaboration becomes the novel’s backbone. Between 1900 and 1940, concerts take Feliu all over Europe and put him into contact with such figures as Queen Ena, Picasso, Elgar, Breton, Kurt Weill—and eventually, tragically, with Feliu’s dead brother’s one-time companion-at-arms, Francisco Franco. The book is almost dizzyingly episodic, but bound together by Feliu’s lifelong struggle with the question of the proper relationship between music and politics, a subject Romano-Lax handles with finesse. The book climaxes in a tragic scene in which Feliu, Al-Cerraz and their violinist, an Italian Jew who is Feliu’s great unconsummated love, are pressed into performing at a 1940 meeting of Hitler and Franco in Vichy France.

A novel whose epic, blockbuster-size scale and ambition work sometimes to its advantage and sometimes not—but all in all a deft, inventive debut.