Product Description

Beautifully repackaged and republished as part of Flamingo's revitalisation of Philip Hensher's acclaimed backlist: a beautifully crafted tale of the loves, lust and lies of a young Viennese opera singer. 'A very accomplished book indeed, brimming with quality and admirably lacking in tricks or literary artifice...a crisply written story with a nice undertow of irony...there is fine writing on every page. The dialogue is inch-perfect and there are some beautifully mournful descriptive passages.' Sunday Telegraph

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #738331 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
philip hensher is Chief Literary Critic for the Spectator, and regularly reviews in the best UK and US newspapers and journals. His other books include The Mulberry Empire, Kitchen Venom, Pleasured and The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife.

Customer Reviews

Sweet
Pretty, whimsical and achingly tender, this is the kind of novel that manages to gently whisper its way right under your skin. The beautiful, emotionally-complicated Friederike leaves her home in Berlin to go and learn to sing in Vienna, but finds herself learning more about the complicated melodies of the heart than she does about vocal technique courtesy of Archy, her equally complicated sometime-lover. The storyline occasionally verges off on a flighty tangent with too many characters and too much family history cluttering the page, and there are times when you end up wishing Friederike would just lighten up. But overall, this is an intelligent summer read - sweet as strawberries with no bitter after taste.

A cloud of deceit
What a puzzling writer Hensher is - from the vindictively acerbic Kitchen Venom to the inch-perfect The Mulberry Empire to this puzzling, almost enervating book. Philip Hensher doesn't do ventriloquism here exactly, although it might be a ventriloquism that imitates his own voice, for there is a sense that he is attempting a book that is nothing if it is not different from its predecessor. However, he cannot but shine through the perplexing, out-of-sync, clever prose and bewilderingly obtuse dialogue, by virtue of the voice alone.

Set in Vienna some time around the early 70s, the story concerns Fredereike, a talented singer in a family of eccentric musicians and music lovers. She falls in with Archy, a dissolute Englishman and the latest in the line of voice coaches hired by her mother to train her up for the opera circuit. There is a vein of light humour, gradually turning heavier as the book progresses. There is the shock of a lost version of the opera Lulu, supposedly re-written by Alban Berg, for Fredereike's grandmother, which turns out to be other than what it seems. There are truncated conversations where people lie to each other with witty insouciance and instantly retract, if not their words, at least their meaning. The whole novel takes place in a cloud of deceit. In the end, one finds it quite hard to care.