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| U.S. cover |
By Morris Dean
In Colm Tóibín's latest novel, Nora Webster, the title character pulls a new life together during the three years immediately following the death of her husband [Maurice] of twenty years. The perhaps most significant strand of her new life is her deeper discovery of music, beautifully told narratively as a series of accidents and benevolent interventions of friends and others who care about her, or take pity on a widow with children.
It's easy to imagine that this music could have such power for Nora, or for anyone – a good special choice by Mr. Tóibín. See what you think....When the Christmas holidays came, Fiona went to Dublin to stay with Aine [an adult daughter] in her bedsit in Raglan Road. Donal took Conor [her two middle-school-age sons] down to Margaret's house everyday [a sister of Nora's]. This meant that, as she prepared the house for Christmas, Nora was alone most of the time. She could listen to records without having to worry about any of the others. She kept the recording of the Archduke Trio as something special; she did not listen to it every day. But if she was annoyed by anyone at work, she would think about this music and promise herself that she would play it as soon as she came in the door. She would listen to it carefully, never using it, as she did with other records, as background music while she was working in the kitchen.
U.K. cover
What she had told no one, because it was too strange, was how much this music had come to stand for. It was her dream-life, a life she might have had if she had been born elsewhere. She allowed herself to live for a time each day in a pure fantasy in which she could have learned the cello as a child and then been photographed as this young woman was, eager and talented and in full possession of her world, with men beside her who depended on her to come in with her deeper, darker sound....[–p. 314]
| Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean |
thanks, added to my almost-endless "books to read" list that i take with me to the Library (mmmm..alllll those books..i will never run out...and its FREE!!...bliss)
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't require music. Who hasn't had his Walter Mitty dreams?
ReplyDeleteI've had many such, though none so obsessive as Nora's. Oddly, though, I disappear from my musical fantasies. They're about the music itself, rather than about myself as a musician.
There seems to be something wrong with your link to the Archduke. The sound is faint, and keeps fading out. I'll need to listen to it, perhaps later on Youtube; one rarely hears trios in performance, and I don't happen to own a recording, so I don't know the piece.
Chuck, excerpting the passage with Nora's "Walter Mitty dream" may have been a flub-up on my part. But in her case, perhaps, such a provocation was necessary – a woman in her culture, a mother with the main family responsibility for raising their children....There are several other passages illustrating the importance of The Archduke Trio to her.
ReplyDeleteSorry that the sound doesn't work for you. It sounds fine on my own computer, with separate, small stereo speakers.
Ok, more meaning than is apparent from this passage. The situation you describe would be very different from mine. My parents established a House Rule that anyone who wanted to play music could do so, anytime, without asking. (Girls too.) It must have tried their patience, sometimes, but music as a right was an even greater gift than not having a television.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what the playback problem was. I went to the same video on YouTube, and it played just fine.