A sweet escape for fans of classical music.
Schilling, in her debut work of historical fiction, combines Beethoven with a charming bit of time travel.
Eighteen-year-old Annalisa Helfing, known to her closest friends as Elise, is a brilliant, hardworking student of classical piano. But just how gifted she is, and why, isn’t clear until she steps in front of a fast-moving car. The impact not only knocks her off her feet—it also knocks her out of time, transporting her back to a 19th-century version of her home village of Heiligenstadt. There, the notoriously cantankerous Ludwig van Beethoven has just arrived in town, where he’s trying to come to terms with his worsening hearing loss. The nuns at a nearby convent nurse Elise back to health, but her independent spirit gets her into trouble. Soon she’s put to work as “Mr. Ludwig’s” housekeeper, getting her out of the convent and within reach of a piano. The rest is, as they say, history—a rather lovely imagining of the story behind Beethoven’s famous composition “Für Elise.” Although Schilling sometimes resolves conflicts a little too easily, such as town gossip over young Elise’s living in Beethoven’s home, she steers past most potential clichés to create sympathetic, likable characters. The romance is sweet and, considering the era, a little scandalous, and when Elise’s musical ability catches the eye and ear of wealthy patrons, it’s thanks to hard work and endless practice, not some mystical, time-travel–related gift. “Elise, I cannot help you live in any other time than this one,” Beethoven says. “But if it comforts you, I want you to follow your dream and see it come to fulfillment.” It’s hard to say if Elise really knows what she wants: to return to her own time or to stay in the 19th century and explore a life as wife, musician and music teacher. Eventually, the choice is made for her, but not before she and Beethoven leave indelible marks on each other’s lives in Schilling’s fanciful novel.
A sweet escape for fans of classical music.Pub Date: July 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499301472
Page Count: 162
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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