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?