An Equal Music |
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Vikram Seth
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Pages: 483 (Paperback)
ISBN: 0753807734
Pub: Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
Pub date: 1999-12-20
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 8908
Editorial Review:
Michael plays second violin in an up-and-coming Maggiore Quartet, lives on the north side of Hyde Park, takes early morning dips in the Serpentine, has a French girlfriend named Virginie. But his mind is constantly drawn to his first and only love, Julia, whom he knew in Vienna many years earlier. When he catches sight of Julia on a London bus, he cannot help but pursue her. Vikram Seth's new novel is a gently-paced, multi-layered work, proceeding in short sections which flit from Michael's ongoing search for Julia back to his childhood as a Rochdale butcher's son, his early training and breakdown in Vienna under the tyrannical Carl Kall, and the emotional history of his quartet; while Michael's discovery of a Beethoven trio rewritten as a string quintet acts as a motif for Michael's pursuit of the lost Julia: can Michael recapture the magic of the past, like Beethoven, who deafly transfigured what he so many years earlier had hearingly composed? Seth is quite brilliant at conveying the intense and complex interplay of chamber musicians, in rehearsal and performance (an odd, obsessed, introspective, separatist breed), and manages the near-impossible--to write in 1999 about Art and Love without embarrassment. --Alan Stewart
Reader Reviews:
An excellent read (1/3 people found this helpful)
Perhaps I don't read enough, but I found this book to be an excellent read. I thought it caught the dynamics between a small group of musicians very well and I do not hesitate to recommend it.
A philosophic parable that ends in bad faith. (0/2 people found this helpful)
A friend pointed out to me- in connection with some comments I had made about the poeverty of ideas in Seth's 'Suitable Boy'- that @Equal Music' could be considered a heavy hitting philosophical parable. How so? you might ask. Well, the protagonist is agoraphobic- i.e. he has a problematic relationship with Space- yet, ironically, he is a member of a chamber music quarter. In his life, we see he is unable to solve the 'three body problem' i.e. he can not sustain a triangular relationship- in Vienna he can either relate to his teacher or to his girlfriend-= not both- and later on he becomes pathologically jealous of her.
If Space is the ineluctable modality of the visible, Time is he ineluctable modality of the audible. The protagonist tries to deal with conflicts in the three dimensional world by escaping into the one dimenison of time. The heroine- a very sympathetic character- has the opposite problem. She suffers from a sort of AIDS of the inner ear- and like a HIV positive person, she needs support from her friends and other members of the Music community to come back to her life in Music. Thus her rekindling of her relationship with her former lover serves a good purpose- she can follow visual cues he gives her so as to play with him in concerts. This is a beautiful metaphor of how the Gay community showed great courage and sensitivity in the wake of the Pandemic- and it is a metaphor of equal applicability to communities overcoming traumatic events.
The ending of the novel is very disappointing. The protagonist indulges in some over-wrought Jacobean prose and ends on a note of pure bad faith- surely SEth must have read SAtre's Nausea?- how could he in all seriousness- without a trace of irony- resurrect a pre-war mushy Bergson-for- maiden-aunts aesthetics and serve it up for a post modern audience?
Does he hae his tongue in his cheek? I honestly don't know. All the material is there for another, more positive solution- but Seth doesn't take that road.
The protagonist comes from Rochdale- home of the Co-operative movement- he feels strongly about Thatcherism and the atomisation of Society- but can he connect up the dots and see that the solution to Society's problem is along the same path as the overcoming of his own agoraphobia and inability to sustain triangular relationships? Nope! Why not? Seth won't let him. I don't get it- I'm baffled.
Disappointing: An Unsuitable Follow-up (3/5 people found this helpful)
This easy read is perfectly good for passing a week on a beach or a tedious airplane journey -- but it falls far short of A Suitable Boy. The back cover of my copy is covered with rave reviews that seem to refer to an entirely different book from the one I read. I found the book deeply disappointing. The characters are thinly developed and, occasionally, rather cliched; lots of potentially interesting angles are never developed and go nowhere. The action drifts from London to Vienna and Venice, but none of these places is described in an especially atmospheric or interesting way. (How very different from A Suitable Boy, which plunged us so sumptuously, so colourfully into India!) Occasional poetic flourishes, for no obvious reason, simply highlight how very mediocre the rest of the book is. If you're considering reading a Seth novel and you don't know where to start, for goodness sake start with A Suitable Boy, which is an absolute masterpiece and a delight from the first word to the last, not with this book. If you've already A Suitable Boy and you're looking for another Seth just like it, this will leave you empty and disappointed.
An Equal Music (2/4 people found this helpful)
As with all of Seth's work, this is an equisitely crafted novel, well written and descriptive. Despite the evident skill throughout the book, I didn't enjoy it. The hero is selfish and weak and the plot a little unsettling. Other characters seem one-dimensional and do little to generate sympathy or understanding. It also calls for the reader to have a degree of knowledge of Classic music. If you pick this up expecting another Suitable Boy, you will be disappointed.
Pretty average... (1/4 people found this helpful)
It took me quite a while to get into this book, and when I did I wasn't that impressed. It doesn't read very easily and I also found that I got frustrated with the storyline.
However, I did get very attached to the characters and I really longed for them to get what they wanted. Once I did get into it, the story was actually quite good and the musical aspects of the book were rather brilliant. I can't imagine how much research must have gone into this book. The way in which Seth describes music really makes you hear it and I understand that there is actually a soundtrack to go with the book although I haven't heard it myself.
Although the storyline was actually good, I still think it could have been told in half as many pages and been just as good.
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Categories
Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories:
Books -> Subjects -> Fiction -> General
Books -> Subjects -> Fiction -> Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards -> Literary Fiction
Books -> Special Features -> Search Inside!
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