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Title: Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty ISBN: 0-393-31841-9 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: November, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.23 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Beautifully orchestrated, gracefully written.
Comment: This multileveled novel tells of a young woman who escapes her Irish family, studies music with world class artists and composers, carves out a personal and professional life in a world dominated by men, and then returns briefly for the funeral of her estranged father and reconciliation with her mother. But it is also a search for grace in its various definitions. As a composer, Catherine looks for the "notes between the notes...graces, grace notes." A Catholic who no longer believes, she sees "music as the grace of God...a way of praying."
Appalled by the cruelty and intolerance which "religious" men have shown each other throughout history, she believes that "her act of creation [not religious dogma]...define[s] her as an individual...and define[s] all individuals as important."
She embarks on a series of religious compositions at the same time that she rejects the church and its teachings about marriage and family. Choosing not to marry the father of her child, she nevertheless recognizes her daughter as a miracle, a profound mystery which "there was no form of music to celebrate or mark..."
Filled with symbols of Fatherhood, baptism, ascension, rebirth, and ultimate triumph, MacLaverty's Grace Notes is a compelling and sensitive exploration of a young woman's attempt to reconcile her humanity with the universal mysteries of creation.
Rating: 4
Summary: Music in Words
Comment: Each year, I await the Booker Prize shortlist with baited breath. My personal taste tends to run pretty close to that of the panel, and some of my favorite books have been winners of the award. So, I approached Grace Notes, a "frontrunner" for this year's prize, anticipating a great read. By and large, MacLaverty delivered. His protagonist is a profoundly depressed young woman who makes her way to the light through the power of music, and specifically through the act of composition. Along the way, she overcomes the death of her father, the constriction of her Irish Catholic upbringing, and the disappointment of a failed relationship that leaves her a single mother. MacLaverty's description of her depression is truly masterful, and the best literary evocation of mental illness that I have encountered in some time. Similarly, the climactic passage where she emerges from her darkness has the emotional impact of the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth. And yet...I found the two major sections of the book to be of uncertain relationship one to the other. I couldn't even place them in the correct chronological order. This discontinuity detracted from my otherwise great pleasure. A good book, worth a read, but not a great one and, I think, not a Booker Prize winner.
Rating: 4
Summary: The notes between the notes
Comment: This book is a short read, but not as easy at is seems at the first sight.
Catherine McKenna is a young girl, an only child struggeling to be free from the bounds the her Northern Irish parents. She has a very special talent for music, and her music teacher from childhood becomes a very special person in her life. She teaches her to read the notes between the notes, the Grace Notes, and this gives special meaning to Catherine's life and music. And also special meaning to the book. The book can be read as words within words, which makes the book full of grace notes.
What fascinates me most with the book is the way Bernard MacLaverty shows us how to read or look at music just like we read or look at paintings. Having read several books about the stories behind Vermeers painting, MacLaverty also uses a Vermeer painting to show music.
I can fully agree with a the reviewer Tobias Hill from The Times: "The strongest impression left by Grace Notes is that of its central image-og the 'notes between the notes' which seem to compose themselves - of a life happening while it's heroine is busy making other plans...If architecture is frozen music, Grace Notes is the literary equivalnt, full of its own powerful rhythm.
Britt Arnhild Lindland
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Title: Irish Classics : by Declan Kiberd ISBN: 0674010086 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: 30 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Marina Carr: Plays 1 : Low in the Dark, The Mai, Portia Coughlan, By the Bog of Cats... by Marina Carr ISBN: 0571200117 Publisher: Faber & Faber Pub. Date: 01 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks ISBN: 0142001430 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 30 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays by Martin McDonagh ISBN: 0375704876 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 08 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: To Ireland, I (Clarendon Lectures in English Literature, 1998) by Paul Muldoon ISBN: 0198184743 Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr Pub. Date: November, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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