Clara: A Novel - Softcover

Galloway, Janice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743238532 ISBN 13: 9780743238533

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

With "some of the greatest words ever written on thwarted love since Romeo and Juliet" (The Times, London), Clara reignites, from between the lines of history, the great love of Robert and Clara Schumann.
This impassioned novel gives voice to Clara Wieck Schumann, one of the most celebrated pianists of the nineteenth century, who today is best remembered not for her music but for her marriage. "How often you must purchase my songs with invisibility and silence, little Clara," says Robert, and, for Clara, the price of his love is dear. Shrouded in alternate layers of music and silence, the Schumann union was anything but a lullaby, marked by her valiant struggle for self-expression and his tortuous descent into madness.
With Clara, a deeply moving fugue of love, solitude, and artistic creation, Janice Galloway "has taken a melodic line and scored it for an orchestra" (The New York Times Book Review).

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Janice Galloway's Clara was named the 2002 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year. Galloway is the author of the story collections Blood and Where You Find It and the novel The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, winner of the 1990 MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year Award, and Foreign Parts, which won the 1994 McVitie's Prize. In 1994 she also won the E. M. Forster Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

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Chapter One: Seit ich ihn gesehen

Since first I saw him

Half-light and rain.

The path of the street shines along the rim of guttering. Look up.

Behind the glass, a girl, a little girl, a young woman, maybe, is looking back. She can't see you, she won't object. You can look as long as you like. The light is bad but she's distinct enough, hair pulled back and her eyes full almond shapes, the size of bay leaves. Wide. She has a generous lower lip, a gypsy mouth; skin pale as cheese. You see braids and ribbon, the sheen of dark hair slatted with something that might be pearls, can almost smell the lavender, pomade. Nine, perhaps? This dark, at this distance, it's impossible to be sure. She shifts, half in shadow. Whatever else, she's certainly a child. No one is with her. Nothing moves and rain glints on the paving. Once in a while, she presses a hand against the glass, blurring an outline on the pane. Her mouth opens a little as though she might speak. But nothing comes. There is only stillness, the silent house. This curiously undiverting undiverted child, watching. Waiting.

Hand.

This is a hand. My hand.

There are web partitions between the fingers. The function of the skin is to protect and cover. The function of the joint is to flex; of the muscles to clench and release. The nerves and circulatory channels cannot be seen. Their function is sensory evaluation, animation. Life. Long tendons reach the fingertips, slip through a bracelet of bone in the wrist.

Everything comes from the shoulder.

She looks at her hand, these fourteen crooks, the chicken-leg muscle under the thumb, its tight parcel of buried bones. So many bones.

Her hand.

His.

Listen! You can hear it plain.

Someone is playing exercises.

His hand, the solid pressure he exerts upon the keys. Not Czerny, not Hummel -- he plays his own. Simple but effective, the same half-melodies over and over, designed for discipline, the honing of muscle. Aesthetics be damned: training is what comes first. His fourth finger sticks and it starts again, staccato next time, contrary motion, sliding between major and minor, just to keep his fingers trim. No pauses; no sooner does one finish, than it turns on its heel and starts again. This is the start of everything: stubborn pursuit of self-defined perfection through tedious hours of the same, the same. Practice, patience, what-ever you like to call it. He has his own name.He calls it endurance and it abideth for ever. The little G minor triplets passage runs into the distance, vanishes like a mouse. Then he catches it by the tail and drags it back, backwards. Clever, a mental arithmetic that falls into place quite naturally after a while, happens almost without thought. And while it's happening, something else slips in alongside. Listen again: something married to, but not one with, the keys. Something human for a start. Take a moment, allow yourself: it's there, quite clear. A woman, singing. Her voice is high, expressionless, saving itself for more. A voice that puts itself through its paces: a ladder of five ascending notes, tonic to dominant, back again. That done, it cranks up a semitone, does it fresh: a five-note bloom and fade again, another semitone, again. Soon it's as high as you think it can go and -- it does it one more time. It's not Johanna, silent Johanna. Johanna wouldn't have sung if her life depended on it. It's not a student because a student would have been with Papa, working in tandem, not elsewhere, trying to swim against the piano that ignored everything but itself. Whose, then? The same answer comes back every time. Mother. Her mother's voice. There's no one else's it could have been. Does knowing make the voice more beautiful, more keenly felt? Perhaps. Another, surely there will be one last flourish, and the woman will appear entire around it, if only in your imagination; the voice will come into itself. So you wait. Your ears strain, waiting. Only the piano keeps going, churning the same cycles, oblivious. For whatever reason, the voice has gone. You can't even remember it. The texture of the sounds, the edge of it against the ear. Gone.

Sound.

That memory is made of sound before it's made of anything else, she has no doubt. That it is not as ephemeral as it appears she has no doubt either. After the kiss, the glass of lemon water, the scent of orchids is gone, it's gone. But a fragment of music somehow remains. And she knows that when she is alone in bed, in the early hours before dawn, music comes whether she likes it or not: a sliver of Chopin, one stubborn phrase of Beethoven, the edges and elbows of countless songs. And these. Her earliest memories, maybe, but something etched inside the skull, heard again and again till they stuck for ever and one in the same. Father raising his inventions to the sky. Mother, in another place entirely, singing.

Sing. One word. Sing!

She doesn't speak, has never spoken. Four years old and not a word.

Some people say she's deaf or simple; others that she's both.Poor Herr Wieck! She hears them herself. Leering down with faces like owls, mouths open wide so the rotted places in their teeth show.Hello! they roar. Hello, little lady! in warm clouds, heavy with pig fat, garlic, tobacco. She peers out at them, protecting her nose behind the grey mask of someone's skirts, unblinking. Unfocused. After that, they give up. They turn to father, the baby with a face like a bloater, knock horseshit from their shoes -- anything but persist with this awkward child. Never speaks. Never smiles. Thin as a stick with monstrous eyes; they can't even say she's pretty. Never mind. They give her sweets anyway, let her father take them away, wag his finger in mock-warning, let the talk turn to other things. Weather, they say. Who's married, who's sick, who's died. Business ah! Business. The fascinating Subject of Business and How it Thrives. And even at four, she knows what business means. Business means pianos. It also means Mother and all those notes, tickets, money and students, but mostly pianos. This talking, mouths chewing verbal cud, always runs for some time. After that, there is remarking about the state of the roads, who has dropped in or out of the subscription series, concerts and optional cooing at Gustav -- this last always brief. Gustav is only a baby and, by definition, not interesting. He doesn't cry, yet. He squeaks like a stood-on puppy; only...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0743238532
• ISBN 13: 9780743238533
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande