Showing results for "Sonata" in Literary Fiction

Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in Switzerland where the horrors of the Second World War seem distant. He adores his mother, but she treats him with bitter severity, disapproving especially of his intense friendship with Anton, the Jewish boy at school. A gifted pianist, Anton is tortured by stage fright; only in secret games with Gustav does his imagination thrive. But Gustav is taught that he must develop a hard shell, 'like a coconut', to protect the softness inside - just like the hard shell perfected by his country to protect its neutrality.

ch novelist de Moor (Duke of Egypt) traces narrative arabesques around the terrible romantic jealousy suffered by a blind music critic in this spare, delicate novel. In a series of chance encounters at European airports over the years, the musicologist narrator meets the famous blind patrician music critic, Marius van Vlooten, and extracts his history of tortured love. The first encounter elicits the desperate tale of unrequited love that drove Marius, as a student years before, to shoot himself in the head, thus blinding himself.

De Moor has built her latest novel around the Kreutzersonate by the Czech composer, Leos Janácek, who, in turn, based his string quartet on the novel of the same name by Leo Tolstoy. In Tolstoy’s story, a man and a woman are playing the sonata Ludwig van Beethoven composed for the French violinist and composer Rudolphe Kreutzer. The two fall in love as they play, which poisons the husband’s mind with jealousy, so that he kills his wife.

Five hundred years have passed, and Earth is but a distant memory, a story told to children. Bellatrix is humanity’s home now, as well as its future. When the alien race responsible for mankind’s rescue returned, humanity found that its rescue came at a price—it had to serve its alien masters to repay that act, and the Chosen were formed.