Set within music and choral singing, Sheffer's stories are filled with human frailty and gentle humor. Each story focuses, to one degree or another, on the elusiveness of perfection, the compromises that musicians must always make.
"Music of the Inner Lakes is a tightly knit but beautifully modulated collection of stories about the loss and recovery of music, a metaphor for aging and remembrance, death and rebirth. When the hand cannot play, when the voice cracks, when the choir begins to disintegrate, that is the exact moment Mr. Sheffer begins his deft exploration of one life's ending, another's turning toward new commitments and love."-Eugene Garber, author of Metaphysical Tales and The Historian: Six Fantasies of the American Experience
"The music here is the singing of the human spirit: most often a solitary voice, plaintive, urgent, heartbreaking-sometimes a little off-key, but no less compelling.... Occasionally, voices will blend into a perfect chord, even a perfect song, before the singers separate back into exile. 'I only want to sing beautiful music: says one. In this collection, Roger Sheffer does just that."-William Trowbridge, author of O Paradise
Ten stories about the transcendence of music; the music of aging, death, and deliverance; the music of paths, rotten logs in the woods, icy lakes; music in the flesh; music as family history; music cellular and ultraviolet, glowing about the bonesmusic as the Oversoul. Within its chosen compass, Sheffers second collection (after (Borrowed Voices, 1990) strikes many different notes, often within a single tale. In Bald Soprano, for example, a chipper, song-loving, yet fading man of 74, who is losing his memory (he can barely remember five minutes past), dresses up in his dead wifes frayed skirt and goes to church on Halloween to play a joke on the choir singers gathered for Friday-evening rehearsal. They dont see him and leave, but he stays behind in a dimly lit pew talking with a bearded stranger he cant quite see, a stranger (Death?) who can sing two octaves below middle C in a bass so low it cant be heard. Where are the choir singers? the stranger asks. Theyre gone. They sang and theyre gone. Gone, as all singers must go. In the title tale, a man who has given up his guitar playing and songwriting after losing two fingertips is miraculously renewed when he hears a genetically twisted, nearly moronic backwoods family from the deepest hills sing some simpleminded throat clutchers that leave him struck with envy. He hikes out to visit them with a woman who lags behind him on the steep path. In her pale flat voice, she sang for a while, alone, and then with other voices. Or it may have been the wind accompanying her, blowing across the hard edges of a well-tuned forest. A yearning, lambent collectionand a balm to music lovers. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
