A deeply realized tale of the power of music and the anonymity of history.
In Hamlin’s debut novel, a modern music lover attempts to unlock the secrets of a 101-year-old recording.
In 2018 Chicago, classical music producer Ben Weil usually works with live musicians, but he’s just been offered an unusual, posthumous collaboration: to identify and master a long-lost sonata recorded just over a century ago on five wax cylinders and recently uncovered in the storage room of a Maine antique shop. The sonata’s author is unknown, and the pianist is listed only as J Garnier. The work is unlike anything Ben has ever heard: “The music is boundlessly curious, eager to trespass and transgress and build anew. Even today it would be considered avant-garde—how could it possibly be a century old? And the unknown player is a virtuoso by any measure. Every second of the recording beguiles.” Still reeling from the recent end of his marriage, Ben throws himself wholly into the mystery, attempting to decipher the secrets of its music and the identity of its brilliant composer. Ben’s story alternates with another that’s set in Boston in 1915, featuring French-born Elisabeth Garnier, who has training as a social worker but is currently working as a saleswoman for the Bell Company, using her charisma and European sophistication to peddle Imperial Graphophones to the wealthiest households of Boston. Her assignment takes her into the home of the Sanborns, a coffee-industry dynasty with a taste for music—an association that changes her life forever. When Ben accidentally shares the sonata with other influential members of the classical music community, allowing them to imagine that he is the composer, he risks turning a historical mystery into a contemporary scandal.
Over the course of this novel, Hamlin’s rich prose is as deft and precise as the skills of his characters, imbuing the descriptions of music with beauty and drama. For example, when a pianist friend plays the sonata, Ben “wonders what she’s thinking, how her musical mind, with its encyclopedic grasp of the twentieth-century piano repertoire, is analyzing it. But then she moves into the short minor phrase and lands on the first of the suspended chords, her articulation confident, her touch sublime.” There’s a depth of expertise on display in this novel—not only regarding musical theory and history, but also the recording equipment of different eras. Some of the most intriguing passages in the book relate to the wax cylinders, an instance of a fragile technology that contains some of the most impressive analog craftsmanship of the early 20th century. The novel is perhaps 50 pages too long, and the story builds to a conclusion that is perhaps a bit cuter—and certainly more incredible—than it needs to be. Still, by that point, readers will have bought into the tale and be willing to follow it wherever it goes. Classical music fans, in particular, will enjoy this immersive story in which art, technology, and class pressures coalesce to create a timeless work of art.
A deeply realized tale of the power of music and the anonymity of history.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781963101003
Page Count: 422
Publisher: Green City Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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