Marta's Reading Insight
| Marta's Reading InSight | number 9 |  |
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How about a good story with music as an integral part of the plot? These fiction books are enriched by musical themes.
| Midnight Hour Encores by Bruce Brooks |
Here is a teen book, which musical adults may enjoy. Sibilance is a musical prodigy who lives with her father, but who decides she wants to meet her mother who left the day Sib was born. A strong, confident and disciplined classical cellist, Sib sets out with her father to meet her mother. On the trip, her father introduces Sib to the pop culture of the sixties (Dylan, Bo Diddley) in preparation for the shock of the hippie woman he expects. Father-daughter conversations about music and musicians are the basis for the loving relationship at the heart of this novel. |
| Soloist by Mark Salzman |
Another child cellist prodigy finds his talent inexplicably gone at age eighteen. At 36, he is working as a college professor who is aloof and socially unskilled. Summoned to jury duty for the trial of a Zen student accused of killing his master, he also agrees to give cello lessons to a 12-year-old Korean boy. Both the jury deliberations and the emotional intensity of the Korean family provoke involvement in life and recognition of emotions long ignored. A story of coming to terms with life as it is, not as it might have been. |
| The Music Room by Dennis McFarland |
A musical and dysfunctional family is featured in the story of yet another cellist, whose wife is divorcing him and whose brother has committed suicide. His brother's pregnant ex-girlfriend, a choral conductor, becomes his lover. They travel to the family estate in Virginia, where memories of his father, a failed concert pianist and drunk, are exorcised. Haunting and painful, a story of family members united by a connection to music. |
| Body & Soul by Frank Conroy |
Rags to riches-by way of musical genius, this is the tale of a 1940's fatherless, New York city kid, whose awakening to music leads to study with a nearby music store owner. Scholarship to a private high school, performances as a famous pianist, marriage and divorce, a breakdown and a comeback - all culminate in recognition as a prize-winning composer. A somewhat melodramatic tale enriched and driven by the life of great music. |
| Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason |
A late 19th-century historical about a quiet tuner of rare pianos, who is summoned from London to Burma to repair the instrument of an eccentric major living in the jungle. Music is one of the tools the major employs to broker peace with the local warlords. The piano tuner becomes enmeshed in the life and loves of Burma, as tragedy unfolds. Rich writing of exploration and self-discovery. |
| The Music: Stories by James Hamilton-Patterson |
This versatile and complex writer uses his love of music - from Muzak to "the music of the spheres"- to unify these vignettes set around the globe. From a POW in North Vietnam to a middle-aged refuge from the Bosnian War to a family at a picnic, each story connects because of the music central to it. Mozart appears in various reincarnations, including one as a Nigerian doctor. An idiosyncratic collection by the author of Gerontius, the story of Edward Elgar's journey up the Amazon. |
Clara |
Thoroughly researched fictional biography of the life of Clara Schumann, best known as champion of her husband Robert, but an acclaimed virtuoso pianist with her own international career. Her ambitious father managed her career and vehemently opposed her marriage to Robert, whose early death left Clara a widow for forty years. The social milieu of the early 19th-centruy is the setting for this compelling musical life. |
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Marta Campbell, Head of Collection Management |  |
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| Tel: 203-291-4842 | E-mail: mcampbell@westportlibrary.org | |||
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