reads novels
Aug. 31st, 2009 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacTo my previous post about music in fiction, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
irontongue recommended Robertson Davies' A Mixture of Frailties, even though, being about the musical education of a singer, it didn't qualify for my list of novels with fictional composers. Actually, I find on reading it that it does qualify, as one of the principal characters is a composer. His name is Giles Revelstoke, who is said to be inspired by Peter Warlock; certainly their oeuvres seem to be similar. At the point I've reached, his cantata da camera called The Discoverie of Witchcraft has just been premiered on Radio 3. It's a challenging work to get performed because of its unusual ensemble requirements. "It calls for soprano and bass-baritone soloists, a double quartet of better than average choral singers, and an orchestra consisting of string quartet and double-bass, with piano, oboe and French horn. Just the size to be neglected."
The protagonist, the young soprano, is one of nature's innocents rapidly learning the ways of the wicked world. One clash with her environment is over musical taste. When placed at a piano at her audition, "she played what she called Dance, Micawber, and instead of being a Dickensian medley by some lesser Percy Grainger it was Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre." Her favorite song, winced at by some and contra-fashionably defended by others, is a sentimental old number called Tosti's Goodbye. Tosti could have been as fictional as Revelstoke for all I knew, but it turns out he did exist and so does the song. You can watch, and listen to, Deanna Durbin singing it ... and singing it ... and singing it ... here.
In other reading, I found Get Real, the last of the late Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder novels, on the new book shelf at a library. I wrote my summa for Westlake at the time of his death here, but for some reason I didn't mention that five years ago I'd written, and put up on the web, a summary/evaluation of all the books (that I'd read, at least) that he'd published under his own name (leaving out the many under pseudonyms). I thought it was about time I updated that. I hadn't been keeping close track of his output more recently, and was surprised to discover that the only qualifying books in the interim had been two other Dortmunder novels, and I'd read both of those. So it was the quick work of reading one Westlake (and re-reading two others, because it is a characteristic of his later work that I have trouble remembering it) before I could update the annotated bibliography.
One thing it's hard to convey in a list like this is that the Dortmunder books come in three periods which differ greatly. The earliest 3 or 4 books are hard-boiled but intensely comic, drawing much of their humor from characters who continually misunderstand what others are saying. Dortmunder has bad luck, but he's sharp: it isn't until the second period that he becomes a true schlimazel who's a step behind everybody else and for whom everything always goes wrong. They're still hilarious, but now the humor is situational. That's the Dortmunder that people tend to remember, but it only lasted a few books. For half the series now - and these are all the longest books - he's regained his competence at the cost of becoming a gloomy pessimist (which he wasn't when he deserved to be). These later books have comic set-ups, but they're written entirely seriously and have few laughs as I'd define humor. They are, however, rather sentimental and soft-hearted towards their characters, which earlier Westlake books (and even more most of his later non-Dortmunder novels) were not.
irontongue recommended Robertson Davies' A Mixture of Frailties, even though, being about the musical education of a singer, it didn't qualify for my list of novels with fictional composers. Actually, I find on reading it that it does qualify, as one of the principal characters is a composer. His name is Giles Revelstoke, who is said to be inspired by Peter Warlock; certainly their oeuvres seem to be similar. At the point I've reached, his cantata da camera called The Discoverie of Witchcraft has just been premiered on Radio 3. It's a challenging work to get performed because of its unusual ensemble requirements. "It calls for soprano and bass-baritone soloists, a double quartet of better than average choral singers, and an orchestra consisting of string quartet and double-bass, with piano, oboe and French horn. Just the size to be neglected."The protagonist, the young soprano, is one of nature's innocents rapidly learning the ways of the wicked world. One clash with her environment is over musical taste. When placed at a piano at her audition, "she played what she called Dance, Micawber, and instead of being a Dickensian medley by some lesser Percy Grainger it was Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre." Her favorite song, winced at by some and contra-fashionably defended by others, is a sentimental old number called Tosti's Goodbye. Tosti could have been as fictional as Revelstoke for all I knew, but it turns out he did exist and so does the song. You can watch, and listen to, Deanna Durbin singing it ... and singing it ... and singing it ... here.
In other reading, I found Get Real, the last of the late Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder novels, on the new book shelf at a library. I wrote my summa for Westlake at the time of his death here, but for some reason I didn't mention that five years ago I'd written, and put up on the web, a summary/evaluation of all the books (that I'd read, at least) that he'd published under his own name (leaving out the many under pseudonyms). I thought it was about time I updated that. I hadn't been keeping close track of his output more recently, and was surprised to discover that the only qualifying books in the interim had been two other Dortmunder novels, and I'd read both of those. So it was the quick work of reading one Westlake (and re-reading two others, because it is a characteristic of his later work that I have trouble remembering it) before I could update the annotated bibliography.
One thing it's hard to convey in a list like this is that the Dortmunder books come in three periods which differ greatly. The earliest 3 or 4 books are hard-boiled but intensely comic, drawing much of their humor from characters who continually misunderstand what others are saying. Dortmunder has bad luck, but he's sharp: it isn't until the second period that he becomes a true schlimazel who's a step behind everybody else and for whom everything always goes wrong. They're still hilarious, but now the humor is situational. That's the Dortmunder that people tend to remember, but it only lasted a few books. For half the series now - and these are all the longest books - he's regained his competence at the cost of becoming a gloomy pessimist (which he wasn't when he deserved to be). These later books have comic set-ups, but they're written entirely seriously and have few laughs as I'd define humor. They are, however, rather sentimental and soft-hearted towards their characters, which earlier Westlake books (and even more most of his later non-Dortmunder novels) were not.
