Rating: 5/5
Review:
An excellent book
I thought The Gustav Sonata was excellent. It
is extremely well written and quietly but penetratingly perceptive about a
lot of aspects of life and relationships.
The story is of Gustav Perle, who is born in wartime Switzerland.
We get three separate time periods: when he is a young boy growing up, the years
before his birth when his parents met and began their life together, and the
1990s as things play out in late middle age. In fact, there's not much
action, but a lot happens, as Gustav befriends Anton, a Jewish boy of his own
age whose family, in contrast to his own are well off, and who is encourage to
become a professional pianist by his parents. The meat of the book is an
examination of the relationships between parents and children, how even small
acts of selfishness or of nobility can have profound, lasting consequences, the
nature if fulfilment and so on.
It all sounds rather hard going, but I found it griping and
very easy reading. Rose Tremain has a fine, subtle psychological
grasp of how character may be formed, which is refreshingly far removed
from the current lazy fad for "serial-killer's-motivation-explained-by-childhood-abuse."
Here we have clear-eyed views of how poverty, love or the lack of it,
misguided parental pressure and so on may affect people, and there are a lot of
other very powerful insights.
The prose is excellent. It is clear and
straightforward, but has real power in its apparent simplicity. In the
first section, Gustav's childhood outlook is brilliantly evoked in short,
simple, almost childlike sentences, for example. It felt fresh and drew
me in very effectively. I also liked the subtle, unshowy way that the injunction
to Gustav to "master yourself" and show no emotion is mirrored in
Switzerland's coldly brutal refusal to admit Jews who are then condemned to die
by the Nazis. It's all done without fuss or melodrama and is all the more
effective for it.
This is a book which, in my view, lives up to its
hype, I found it readable, touching and rather haunting, and I can
recommend it very warmly.
(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)
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