Altar Music: A Novel - Hardcover

Weber, Christin Lore

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684868660 ISBN 13: 9780684868660

Publisher: Scribner, 2000

Synopsis

In her first novel, Christin Lore Weber, a former nun, explores the nature and power of passion - sexual, religious, and artistic - and brings us into a mysterious, cloistered world rarely made public. Set in the wild, rock-and-lake region of northern Minnesota, this is an exquisitely told tale of three generations of strong-willed women and their inner battles to balance personal longings with the disciplines of their church.

About this title

Review:

Christin Lore Weber's first novel explores three generations of devoutly Catholic women. Living in rural northern Minnesota in the first half of the 20th century, these sisters, daughters, and grandmothers struggle with their relationships with God, their feverishly repressed passions, their erotic memories and longings. Altar Music boasts some great sex scenes, worthy of The Best American Erotica. The only problem is that afterward the women are so repentant they shut down. Young mother Kate Pearson becomes "like porcelain under his fingers" before her husband goes to fight in World War II. "She felt how he had touched her just last night and how her flesh fought against her mind for release." Her daughter, Elise, after playing doctor with her friend Margaret, prays "Please, holy Mary, don't let God send me to hell. Please come and tell me God's not mad at me."

The expression and repression of natural sexual drives is what moves this book along. Its title refers to the piano lessons Elise takes from a once-famous concert pianist who gave it all up to marry God. (It's worth mentioning at this point that Weber entered a convent after high school and was a nun for 14 years.) Each chapter is preceded by a lesson from Sister Mary's notebooks: "Repetition is never exact. Develop nuance, subtle shading--Soul." The discipline of the piano becomes a metaphor for the attempt to tame the music of the body--to make it something pretty and recognizable, not furious and consuming. --Emily White

About the Author:

Christin Lore Weber grew up in northern Minnesota, leaving home after high school to enter the convent. She worked as a nun for fourteen years before becoming a writer. The author of six books of confiction, including Circle of Mysteries and binding Stone, she lives in the Pacific North-west with her husband. This is her first novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0684868660
• ISBN 13: 9780684868660
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256