An Equal Music |
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Vikram Seth
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Pages: 483 (Paperback)
ISBN: 0753807734
Pub: Phoenix
Pub date: 1999-12-20
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 65928
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:
Moving and fast moving (0/0 people found this helpful)
An easy book to read as the plot flies along, the characters are very well drawn, the dialogue is good and the sense of yearning from the main protagonist is well drawn.
A love affair that ended abruptly without as the Americans say 'closure'. Both parties remain hurt, still in love with each other but dealing with the extenuating circumstances that crash into everyone's lives and pull them off in different directions. For the main protagonist the book relates the story of a crisis year in his life both in his professional life as a muscian and his love life.
It is extremely well written and very moving at the end as you feel for poor Michael who struggles to withstand the neverending pounding that just being alive can give you. Also if you love classical music the extra dimension this brings is a joy. Not quite great literature but in that territory.
Not for everyone - but definitely for me (0/0 people found this helpful)
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who tend to fall in love Hollywood-style (experiencing head over heels, all-consuming, passionate, exclusive, obsessive love - often illogical and regardless of whether that love is reciprocated) and those who do not.
Michael Holme, the main character and the narrator of Seth's novel, falls into the former category. If you do too, the chances are that you'll empathise with him. If you fall into the latter category and believe that the whole idea of "falling in love" is severely overrated or even simply fictitious, I suspect you'll agree with those reviewers who describe him as a whiner, as self-centred, as melodramatic.
Perhaps Michael Holme is all of those things, but I understand exactly where he's coming from; this, to me, makes Seth's protagonist (with all his flaws) both credible and human. Throughout the book, Seth's beautifully written prose really made me feel Michael's joy and his pain. I smiled and cried over this book in the works' canteen - but I was so gripped that not reading at lunchtime just wasn't an option.
I felt the book was a little slow to get started but I was soon under its spell. This is a story about loss and love of many kinds and for different people, things and places. The plot was believable, I loved the music within it and I could sympathise with the two main characters. It would have been easy for the author to have written a trite ending to the story or a tragic end for the character, but I was relieved that he did neither. I adored this novel. The characters and story resonated as readily with me as my instrument does with Bach's Cello Suites.
A good book with good moments (0/0 people found this helpful)
I'm never one for a stereotypical love story, preferring more challenging takes on the subject (The Time Traveller's Wife for example), and I'm pleased to say that this book was one of of those more challenging attempts. What is excellent about this book are the smooth, almost imperceptible transitions between the love side of the story and the musical side of the story. Being from a musical background, and in fact working in one of the music shops mentioned in the book, I found the first half of the book fascinating. The third quarter didn't grip me as much, but by the end of the book, I couldn't wait to see how everything would end. I would recommend reading this book - the story is excellent, but its real strength comes in stirring up genuine emotions inside you.
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. (0/3 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.
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