Equal Music

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover
• Published by: Broadway Books 1999
• ISBN 10 Number: 1552780473
• ASIN: B000F3T4HC
• Book Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Weighs: 1.4 pounds

Product Review
The violinist hero of Vikram Seth's third novel would very much like to be hearing secret harmonies. Instead, living in London ten years after a key disaster, Michael Holme is easily irritated by his gorgeous young (and even French!) girlfriend and by his colleagues in the Maggiore Quartet. In short, he's fed up with playing second fiddle in life and art. Yet a chance encounter with Julia, the pianist he had loved and lost in Vienna, brings Michael sudden bliss. Her situation, however--and the secret that may end her career--threatens to undo the lovers.

An Equal Music is a fraction of the size of Seth's A Suitable Boy, but is still deliciously expansive. In under 400 pages, the author offers up exquisite complexities, personal and lyrical, while deftly fielding any fears that he's composed a Harlequin for highbrows. During one emotional crescendo, Michael tells Julia, "I don't know how I've lived without you all these years," only to realize, "how feeble and trite my words sound to me, as if they have been plucked out of some housewife fantasy." In addition to the pitch of its love story, one of the book's joys lies in Seth's creation of musical extremes. As the Maggiore rehearses, moving from sniping and impatience to perfection, the author expertly notates the joys of collaboration, trust, and creation. "It's the weirdest thing, a quartet," one member remarks. "I don't know what to compare it to. A marriage? a firm? a platoon under fire? a self-regarding, self-destructive priesthood? It has so many different tensions mixed in with its pleasures."

An Equal Music is a novel in which the length of Schubert's Trout Quintet matters deeply, the discovery of a little-known Beethoven opus is a miracle, and each instrument has its own being. Just as Michael can't hope to possess Julia, he cannot even dream of owning his beloved Tononi, the violin he has long had only on loan. And it goes without saying that Vikram Seth knows how to tell a tale, keeping us guessing about everything from what the Quartet's four-minute encore will be to what really occasioned Julia's departure from Michael's life. (Or was it in fact Michael who abandoned Julia?) As this love story ranges from London to Michael's birthplace in the north of England to Vienna to Venice, few readers will remain deaf to its appeals. --Kerry Fried --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Seth finds his true voice in this lyrical, ravishing tale of star-crossed loversAan English violinist and the pianist he desperately pursues. Unlike his previous work, A Suitable Boy (a 1349-page family melodrama set in 1950s India and self-consciously modeled on the social novels of Dickens, Trollope and Eliot), this novel is tightly controlled, original in design, awash in the musicAand spiritAof Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn, Brahms and Bach. Even readers not familiar with specific pieces of Western classical music will be caught up in the contemporary love story, set mainly in London and Vienna with excursions to Venice and northern England. Michael Holme, brooding member of an English string quartet, endlessly adrift a decade after breaking up with pianist Julia McNicholl, suddenly bumps into her again in London. They resume their affairAwith guilty reluctance on her part, as she's married to an American banker and has a son, but with reckless abandon by Michael, who betrays and then ditches his girlfriend, a needy French violin student 15 years his junior. Beyond mere erotic duplicities, a far more tragic obstacle emergesAJulia is rapidly going deaf. Music, her lifeblood, is slipping away from her, a secret she keeps from her fellow musicians until Michael clumsily reveals it. Around this simple plot, Seth weaves an exploration of the creative process as he delves into the quartet members' quirks and neuroses, their romances, states of exaltation, their synchronous vision. All the rehearsals, shoptalk, fiddling and ruminations blunt the impact of Julia's tragedy and the love story's momentum, but Seth's musical, quicksilver prose keeps the narrative aloft. It's a classy novel, told with keen intelligence and sensitivity, embodying a brave attempt to fathom the world of deafness as well as the high-strung milieu of performing artists. $150,000 ad/promo; author tour; simultaneous audio; rights sold in Denmark, France, Germany, India, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the U.K.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: An Equal Music: A Novel (Paperback) Above all else, Mr Seth implies, the purpose of Art, including music, is to provide pleasure and this work of art, this book, gives the reader pleasure first, an understanding of the process that goes into making art (music) second, and third, a story which centres on a lover/musician and his emotional ups and downs as he engages with the glorious and partly deaf pianist Julia who seems to embody the perfect vehicle for making love/music. Some of the glories of the book is its sheer sensuousness as it engages the reader in a journey into sensual pleasure and shows how one art, reading, can reveal the pleasures of other arts, sounds, colours, fragrances. The impact of sound/art re Janet Cardiff (b.1957), the consciousness of sounds (p.61) the connections between sounds, the importance of the contract between the performer and the audience and the state of both during performance - associations, memories, mood; the importance of silence. The book is rich in such considerations and provides a real understanding of the connection between the humanity of the performers and the making of music and the development of harmony in performance. It is especially engrossing for any music lover for one of the book's instruments -an Ononi violin - is invested with a powerful personification so that the reader begins to feel for its well being and future much as the musician at the centre of the story does. Similarly, readers gain a real appreciation of what music making entails, including the importance of the score as opposed to an interpretation of that score by other musicians. In the end, the book recalls that wonderful saying, if music be the food of love, play on. Mr Seth's command of language makes the reading an easy pleasure. You may purchase a double CD of music accompanying pieces performed by the characters in the novel, one, A Beethoven Quintet, never before recorded on CD. Let's face it. A joy to read and hear. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)