"[F]rom this tangled mess of human relations, Tremain draws a conclusion that is simultaneously straightforward and sweetly transformative. Like so much else in this compassionate and musical novel, it hits a perfect note."
"The Gustav Sonata is beautifully rendered, and magnificent in its scope. It glows with mastery."
"This is a perfect novel about life’s imperfection…What Rose Tremain understands, above all, is the tragedy of temperament and the way it plays havoc with choice… Tremain is anything but an indulgent writer and is, here, writing at the height of her inimitable powers."
"[Tremain’s] expertise is evident in its gradual layering of personal history and its subtle mingling of lights and darks."
"The Gustav Sonata is a work of extreme and painful beauty, the story of one profound love amid many failed relationships, and of the conflict between passion and self-control. Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists, and deserves, with this brilliant novel, to reach a wide new audience."
07/25/2016
Tremain’s (The American Lover) melancholic latest centers on the lifelong friendship between Gustav Perle and Anton Zweibel. The book begins in 1947 Switzerland with Gustav and his mother, Emilie, a selfish woman whom Gustav loves in spite of her inability to nurture him. He never knew his father, only that he died in the war. When Anton arrives at Gustav’s kindergarten, and Gustav invites him home, Emilie says, “But of course he is a Jew... The Jews are the people your father died trying to save.” Anton is a talented but nervous child whose well-to-do parents encourage his desire to become a concert pianist. The boys are inseparable, sharing many sweet moments that Tremain beautifully crafts. Like a sonata, the book is divided into three parts. The second section goes back in time to the war following Gustav’s parents’ tragic marriage and the unraveling that hardened Emilie’s heart. In the last section, Gustav has become a lonely but successful middle-aged hotelier in his Swiss hometown. Anton, after years of teaching music, tries to rekindle his career as a pianist, with disastrous personal results. The great strength of Tremain’s writing is her brilliant, uncanny ability to capture the interior life of a child and to celebrate the triumphs of the many older characters populating the final, redemptive portion of the novel as they “become the people always should have been.” (Sept.)
04/15/2016
Boasting Whitbread and Orange honors and perhaps best known for her Booker short-listed Restoration, Tremain examines the friendship between Gustav Perle, who grows up in a small Swiss town during World War II, and a gifted Jewish boy named Anton Zweibel, who's on his way to becoming a concert pianist.
★ 2016-06-21
Like an intense, beautiful, and deeply moving piece of music, Tremain's captivating historical novel hits all the right notes.When we first meet Gustav, the protagonist of Tremain's (Merivel: A Man of His Time, 2012, etc.) exquisite novel, he is 5 years old and living with his none-too-happy widowed mother, Emilie, in their extremely modest apartment in the small Swiss town of Matzlingen. The year is 1947, and the postwar mood is grim, yet Gustav finds patches of color, flavor, and beauty in the drab, gray world he and Emilie inhabit: the dark purple of a nearly new lipstick he discovers in the gratings of the church he and his mother clean to supplement her income from working in a cheese cooperative; the taste of Emilie's knodel; the bloom of the cherry tree in their building's courtyard. Gustav's mother has offered him one chief lesson: he must "master himself," as, she says, his late father did before him. "You have to be like Switzerland," she tells him. "You have to hold yourself together and be courageous, stay separate and strong. Then, you will have the right kind of life." Into this relatively cheerless world walks Anton, a talented yet moody Jewish musical prodigy who becomes Gustav's most treasured friend. In concert with Gustav's story, Tremain, who won the 2008 Orange Prize for The Road Home, also tells that of his father, Erich, a strong, handsome assistant police chief who followed his conscience and his heart. Eventually, Gustav's lifelong friendship with Anton helps him to unlearn the stern lessons of his mother and unlock the secrets and yearnings of his own heart. Spanning the decades from 1937 to 2002, Tremain's novel is less sprawling than it is deeply intimate, a soul-stirring song about friendship, conscience, and love.