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?

Old New York, NOT Don Henley

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (Barnes & Noble Classics, 1920, 2004)


Despite not actually having the same name at all, I spent a lot of my time reading this book while humming along to the mental soundtrack of "The End of the Innocence." And any other Don Henley songs that came up in my head. Also, I saw the movie with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer back when it came out. So I had a hard time displacing those characters from my head, even when they didn't feel quite right.

First off, the casting? I bought DDL as Newland Archer. Actually, that seems just about perfect. Pfeiffer I'm a little more meh about. And then there's Winona Ryder as May Archer (nee Welland). Wharton keeps stressing how Archer views her as being like the Goddess Diana. And I can't think of an actress who inspires that thought less in me. On the other hand, from what I remember, she nails the whole forced innocence thing.

But this isn't a movie review, and I really shouldn't be reviewing movies I saw almost twenty years ago, and when I was awfully young too. So, on to the book.

I'm not going to go into too much analysis, possibly because I'm lazy. Instead, going to be sorta solipsistic. First of all, there were ways in which this novel felt very Russian. Maybe just because most of the 19th-century novels I've read in the past several years (that were not Jane Austen) were Russian. (And yes, I know that this was actually written after WWI, so this may be a really weak point.) Or maybe it's that Mme Olenska reminded me of Anna Karenina. I'm not really sure. But more importantly, it was honestly such a pleasure to read this. I forgot how much I enjoyed the classics. I may be adding more of them to my list.