Grace Notes
Maclaverty, Bernard
ISBN 10: 022404429X ISBN 13: 9780224044295
Published by Random House UK, 1997
Used
Hardcover
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Kennys Bookshop and Art Galleries Ltd., Galway, GY, Ireland
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About this Item
Description:
1997. hardcover. Fine in fine dust wrapper. DW showing light age and shelf wear. Lightly toned, text is crisp and clear and remains a fine copy. First edition copy. . . . Seller Inventory # KSG0044081
Synopsis:
Returning to Belfast after a long absence to attend her fathers funeral, it is brought home to Catherine exactly why she left. But she also remembers the more innocent times and realises she must come to terms with her past. A novel from the author of CAL.
Review: Composer Catherine McKenna has more of a gift for music than happiness, but she has long been driven beyond harmonies (musical and personal) that her Belfast family can understand. Bernard MacLaverty renders both sides of the equation: Catherine's feminist and aesthetic striving and her mother's more traditional grasp; it's hard not to sympathize with Mrs. McKenna's impatient rejoinder, "You don't cope with music, you listen to it."
Grace Notes, MacLaverty's first novel since Cal, is as much about Irish identity--and possibility--as it is about art. Catherine's newest piece, a mass, includes the huge drums Protestants play in parades. "It was a scary sound--like thunder. Like the town was under a canopy of dark noise." Though her fellow Catholics see the drums as instruments of threat, Catherine is determined to integrate them into her composition.
Her return to Belfast for her father's funeral brings back several ghosts, among them an influential professor who spoke of grace notes--"the notes between the notes." This novel is full of such instances, wry snatches of conversation and unforgettable observations: the new Chinese restaurant that has had to offer chips to stay in business, or the pub that's "on a slight hill. When dogs pissed at the door the dark lines ran diagonally to the gutter." These transcend the occasional passage in which MacLaverty tries too hard to see into the life and rhythms of a female artist. The final section, however, a live radio concert of Catherine's piece, is a triumph for both woman composer and male author.
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Bibliographic Details
Title: Grace Notes
Publisher: Random House UK
Publication Date: 1997
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
Edition: 1st Edition