Love notes

An Equal Music - Vikram Seth (Vintage International, 1999)

So I really have been reading, I swear. Watch this mass of posts I'm about to drop on you. :)

I really love how Seth writes. He's beautiful and eloquent without being particularly difficult, so there's an easy flow and rhythm to reading him. (This was of course particularly the case with Golden Gate.) But I just never fell in love with this book. I wanted to. I kept waiting to feel utterly engaged, but I guess that the characters held themselves at such remove that I always felt kept at arm's length. I have to assume this was purposeful, but since I tend to want to fall headlong into my novels, it was difficult for me.

But if you are interested in the world of European musicians, it's still a lovely read. Michael is a violinist in a London quartet, haunted by the love he lost in Vienna when he fled with little warning. From what I can tell, he had serious issues with panic, and working with his mentor there was eating away at him. [With this, I can sympathize.] The lost Julia reappears, through a bus window, and slowly makes her way back into his world. She is married and has a small child, but their lives entangle once more, and she travels with the quartet to Vienna.

There's more to it -- a secret, another panic attack, an elderly and lost father and aunt back in the rural working-class North, and a violin which doesn't belong to him, but which is truly the greatest love and partnership Michael has ever known -- but it's not particularly a plot-driven novel. It's more about the vignettes of thought, observation, remembrance. If I knew more about music, I would venture to guess that the structure is somewhat reminiscent of some sort of work of composition, études maybe?

Drama in Verse

The Golden Gate - Vikram Seth (Faber & Faber, 1986)

It's a novel. Composed of sonnets. 300 pages of sonnets. All of the ababccddeffegg rhyme scheme, although he fudges some rhymes. Oh, and at the end, we see "pain" over and over again. But we also have rhymes for words like Dinkelspiel (hey Dink!) so I can be in a forgiving and still admiring mood.

Here's the thing. This book languished on my shelf for years because I am bad at reading poetry. I get bored, I meander. But when I finally picked it up, I was shocked at how quickly I got into the rhythm of reading it. Occasionally I'd have to stop to admire the construction, or I'd trip over some perceived awkwardness of meter, but the story is so compelling.

I kept saying it was like "Eugene Onegin meets a CW show," but in fairness, Onegin itself is like a great big soap opera. (Seth takes a moment to ask the reader's forgiveness for presuming to follow in Pushkin's footsteps.) My fiance quickly gave up as I tried to get through the interweaving story lines (this guy is dating this chick and his friend is with her brother except then there's a cat and also... etc.) which was disappointing, because I wanted someone to join me in fascination of the train wreck of these people's lives.

People, by the way, who weren't all that different from me. It's the early 80s, so the economic and political climate is a little different, sure, but you're still dealing with highly educated men and women in their late 20s, trying to figure out their place in the world, often colliding together and breaking apart.

So as not to ruin the fun of the plot for anyone who might actually pick up the book one day, I'll leave it there. But I found it shockingly moving. And also quite funny. Much of a chapter concerns the battle between boyfriend John and the grumpy cat who first laid claim to Liz, years earlier. (Made me glad my two boys love each other.) And you can pretty much guess who's going to win that one.