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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An ingenious manipulation of the reader's perceptions., 10 Nov 2002
In this dazzling tour de force, Maurensig plays a clever intellectual game, setting traps for the reader, his prey. Fiendish in his deceptions, he actively engages our emotions from the outset, evoking curiosity about his mysterious characters and their circumstances, inspiring sympathy for teenage musicians surviving psychological torment in music school, and creating enormous empathy for an orphaned boy, homeless, unloved, and passionate about his music. We feel rather than think, we get caught, and we love it.What makes the book even more remarkable to me is that while the author is playing tricks with the reader's emotions and views of reality, he is also creating a passionate tribute to the power of music and artfully structuring his book in the pattern of a musical canon--a round, in which a "melody" is introduced and then chased indefinitely by its imitation, until, as in this novel, it rises "to its supreme fulfillment in an original burst of mutual genius...and [then begins] its descent, its countdown,...its canone inverso." The symbolic melody of a valuable 16th century Stainer violin sets the voices of the canon's narrative aswirl. The first voice, an unnamed old man, buys the violin at auction. The second voice, a writer and passionate lover of music, comes to his hotel the next day to see, and attempt to buy, the violin from its new owner. He tells the old man the story of Jeno Varga, a Hungarian itinerant musician who once owned the violin and who stupefied a tavern audience, playing rapturously the previous year. "One of music's fighters" whose career had, for some reason, been interrupted, Jeno becomes the third and dominant voice as he tells his story to the writer. While I rarely reread a book, I did read this one a second time, marveling at the author's cleverness, amazed at how clearly the characters and events fall into place and the questions are answered, once one has the benefit of hindsight. Dozens of clues and peculiar statements, which I ignored in the first reading, stand out clearly on the second, especially those pertaining to time. The irony of the title is stunning. Like music, this story improves and begins to reveal itself more completely the second time around. Encore. Mary Whipple
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