Still, the sound of Great Personalities clashing makes a rollicking good read.
Scottish novelist and storywriter Galloway (Where You Find It, 2002, etc.) brings us the life and work of Clara Schumann in an impassioned fictional biography.
Young Clara Wieck of Leipzig is her egotistical father’s prize piano pupil: by the time she’s seven, he is molding her into the severely disciplined performer she’ll be for the rest of her life. Her mother, a singer, is sent away and superfluously divorced as the father-daughter duo systematically conquers Europe with Clara’s bafflingly precocious performances of Schubert and Beethoven. When Herr Wieck takes on the patronage of the brilliant, dreamy pianist and composer Robert Schumann, ten years Clara’s senior, there’s a shift in the dynamics of power, and the pubescent girl and Romantic roué fall in love, eventually marrying against her father’s menacing wishes. Midway in the story, Galloway, who has immersed herself in the diaries and letters of these characters to the point of surfeit (she sparks her decorative narrative with breathy exclamations and stream-of-consciousness questions), shifts into overdrive, discovering in Robert’s fits of ardor and despair a key to the tale that Clara’s own sober, diffident personality can’t provide. Brittle, compulsive, engorged on the idea of art for art’s sake—Dear God! Wasn’t Robert an artist, a Great Man?—Robert gradually loses his grip on reality, making it essential that Clara continue her dogged performances from Russia to England in order to keep their bloated household of seven children running. Liszt, Mendelssohn, Chopin, even Wagner waltz through the pages like Halloween trick-or-treaters, and the reader had better have at least a passing knowledge of musical history and composition. Do we ever learn whether Clara possesses true passion or just plays like a dutiful machine? In the end, Clara’s quest to be the Good Wife comes to naught as Robert is institutionalized, giving a sorrowful, nearly hollow note to Galloway’s wildly imagined tale of soured genius.
Still, the sound of Great Personalities clashing makes a rollicking good read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-84449-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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