How is the music? An Equal Music!

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A QUINTET is a group of five people creating music together. The quartet is for four. Have you ever enjoyed Beethoven Quartet? Let’s play one of the quartets of Haydn’s opus 64. Let’s zip along quite merrily. A bit faster.

“I am the trout, the angler, the brook, the observer. I play it in B, in A, in E-flat. Schubert does not object.”

AN EQUAL MUSIC

Let’s play the viola guys in a hope that the music that it will produce will be equal in all measures. Let its pitch, loudness, tone, and tenor all remain unperturbed and isotropic. Let’s hum all the time. Let’s talk about so many V’s… Violin, Viola, Vienna, Venice! Let’s place a big bowl of potpourri in the middle of the room on that ligneous table, to assail your senses. The fragrance will get on you with more syrupy intoxication in such a lovely musical milieu. I am creating a musical air in bookish terminology.

He was a student in Vienna ten years ago, his name is Michael. He is a violinist and he was in love with Julia, she was a pianist. Their paths departed, she got married to someone else and after ten years enters into the life of Michael once again. A musical note that was left unfinished earlier, they try to carry through it together euphoniously once again. That’s it. A patchy and sketchy love affair and too much music!

Vikram Seth is a sublime writer, his writing style is divergent and dissimilar to others especially in this book. Vikram Seth is famous for his ‘A Suitable boy’ and for his poetry too. I have read him in parts. I have read some of his poems too. ‘An equal music’ was my first full-fledged work of the author. I found his flow very captivating and it was not unimpaired at any moment. This prose is lyrical and his short sentences are imposing in their own senses. Yet the colossal trouble encrusted upon my emotional layers by this story was that though I knew what was happening, yet I could not really visualize them properly. My lack of dreaming up was due to the technicalities involved there in the prose. The prose has used so many technical words associated with music and musician, specifically of European Classical music. Their abundant usage turned out to be too much for a general reader. The conversations and dialogues of the book are good and generic, at many places the author has also evoked mood and setting very emphatically with his poetic touch and I have a soft spot for those parts.

But as a whole, this book failed for me on two major fronts, first, it’s too technical, the cry from the aforementioned paragraph above will continue, and second the emotional pitch. In the background an ostensible love story was going on, it was shallow, mechanical, and monotonous both in an emotional and cerebral manner. Its psychic quotient unwillingly got truncated for me. It may not be the case for others but I felt such all the time.

If you love music and know what all these musical technicalities mean, I am sure you will enjoy this book very much. The musical circle has highly appreciated the author for his accurate and veracious description of the understanding of music. But if you are like me who does not know the meaning of all these words yet you do not hate to keep referring to your age-old, half-torn, fully-faded lexicon (like the antique one I have, even in this digital era), you can use your common sense to get proper connotations of whatever was performed by some enthusiastic groups of artists in their respective field, I hope you can like it. I must intimate you in advance that a love story going on in the backdrop initially looked regular and ordinary, and very repetitive in occurrence, yet in the latter part, there is a unique revelation ready to blow you off.

Let positivity prevail in the end. Writing is very good, the trademark of Mr. Seth, and those short sentences with lyrical nudge made me smile many times. After reading almost two hundred and fifty pages, echoing my thoughts through the waves of music, rehearsal, meeting, parting, coming, going, faxes, telephone calls, letters, one after the other, and loads of conversations, I asked myself where the plot was moving. I noticed that even without knowing where the story was leading me to, I was still eagerly reading it, the writing was giving me a claustrophobic pleasure, I guess! And here I say kudos to the author to keep binding me along with great pace despite a poor plot and story.

“Your words have given me life and taken sleep away. The park gates open at first light. Slate- grey and coral, dawn is reflected in the pool. The flowers have been turfed under in the sunken garden. the chack of a squirrel, the splash of a small duck, a blackbird hopping about beneath the thinned-out linden hedge: this is all. I am alone with this troubled joy.”

AN EQUAL MUSIC
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How is this NIGHT?

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Everyone was talking about this book. Just consumed it. Now I grasp mentally what this night was. The title of this book is Night. And the story that follows is also as dark as a night. A pitch-dark night! And when I conclude the book, I recall a few lines of Octavio Paz, at the beginning of the review.

“Lightning or fishes
In the night of the sea
And bird lightning
In the forest night
Our bones are lightening
In the night of the flesh
O world! All is night
Life is the lightening”

OCTAVIO PAZ

The problem is that the story inside the title night is real, rather than fictional and this is the biggest plight. The anguish and horror in this book are not just of suffering, arising out of one person Eliezer. It is a universal pain. This book is a very intimate, firsthand account of a survivor’s perspective that was recorded in his memory permanently, inside the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

In the book, those horrifying events, which are narrated from the viewpoint of a teenage boy who suffered personal losses, seem mostly true to the core and it is very scary. It’s really petrifying and I can’t imagine someone had done such things to human beings. A bunch of human beings treating another bunch of humans like animals, like lifeless stuff, filling them into a cattle car and jostling them hard like mules. Not leaving even infants. Horrible!

“Without passion or hate prisoners were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their neck. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns.”

NIGHT

I know well enough of Holocaust. But this is my first try of any such intimate account on it. This year I have already begun many other books revolving around WWII and Nazi stuff. And with this one, it’s a ghastly opening, very grim emotions it has produced in me.

While the book is about a very heinous and unfortunate historical wrongdoing, a shame on human civilization, the author has made an extremely legible piece of work for the general reader, the original manuscript was written in Yiddish, and is translated quite well in English. The book also shows the writerly craft of the author where he has been able to bring on the tender and heart-touching emotions between the characters with regard to friendships and father-son relations.

“While forced to do work under various kommandos, boys from different places came together and quickly became friends. They knew countless Hebrew songs and so we would sometimes hum melodies about walking the gentle waters of the Jordan River and the Majestic sanctity of Jerusalem.”

NIGHT

The boy is very possessive of his father and wishes to keep himself with him all the time, even in the time of death. He just wants to be close to his father irrespective of whatever happens next.

“I ran to look for my father he was leaning against the wall bent shoulders sagging as if under a heavy load. I went up to him took his hand and kissed it I felt a tear on my hand. Whose was it? Mine? His? I said nothing. Nor did he. Never before had we understood each other so clearly.”

NIGHT

A young boy inside the concentration camp asks his friend that his turn is next and now he will be dead in a few days and thus he counts his days.

“In three days I will be gone, say Kaddish for me.
We promised: in three days when we would see the smoke rising from the chimney we would think of him. We would gather ten men and hold special service. All his friends would say Kaddish.”

NIGHT

The power of Wiesel’s story and its engaging narration has taken me aback, how clearly he has overpowered me as a reader, through his very intense storytelling artistry of a very personal account of his life. One of the most important things that I kept on noticing everywhere is the numinous undertone in the dialogues between the characters. It divulges the spiritual aspect of whatever happened with his life. An incorporeal elucidation!

This book raises many questions, most of them remain unanswered.

“He explained to me with great emphasis, that every question possesses a power that was lost in the answer…”

NIGHT
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19th Century 20th Century Adventure Africa American Asia Booker British Literature Children Classic contemporary Crime Detective Drama Essays fantasy French Literature German Literature Gothic Historical Fiction Horror Humor India Indian Literature magical realism Memoir Music Mystery Nature Netgalley Nobel Prize Non Fiction Novel Novella Philosophy Play Poetry Race Romance Russia Russian Literature School Short Stories War Women