A riveting dramatization of musical history.
A novel that explores the complex relationships among classical composers Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann and the latter’s pianist/composer wife, Clara.
When Schumann, then a young law student, first meets Clara Josephine Wieck, she’s a 9-year-old child. She’s already gaining a reputation as a pianist, though, and when he sees her play, he comes to the realization that he must devote his own life to music. He convinces Clara’s father, Friedrich, to take him on as a piano student, and he moves in with the family. Gradually, the bond between teenage Clara and Robert becomes romantic, but Friedrich furiously opposes their union and forbids them to see each other. He has reason to believe Robert is dishonorable, and he also thinks that the musician is incapable of adequately supporting his daughter financially. However, after time apart, Clara and Robert commit to each other and plan to marry against her father’s wishes. Friedrich does everything in his power to stop them, including taking them to court. After composer Felix Mendelssohn testifies on Robert’s behalf, Clara and Robert wed, but their relationship remains fraught with challenges. Robert wins fame for his original compositions but is unable to make much of an income, and he’s emasculated by Clara’s superior earning power. Clara, too, becomes frustrated that she’s sacrificed her career for his and frets about his deteriorating mental health. When Robert is committed to an asylum after a failed suicide attempt, his friend Brahms serves as a messenger between him and Clara—and falls deeply in love with her. Author Desai (Dancing about Architecture, 2013, etc.) has produced a magisterial work, which is clearly the result of astonishingly thorough research. Although the story revolves tightly around the three main figures, there are also fascinating cameos by such musical luminaries as Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, and Fréderic Chopin, and he memorably depicts the ego-driven rivalries between them. Each has a unique personality, and the author does a lovely job of dramatizing their quirks. Still, the character of Clara steals the show, and she emerges from the shadow of her husband’s much grander reputation as a musical genius in her own right.
A riveting dramatization of musical history.Pub Date: June 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5049-1590-8
Page Count: 824
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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