Music & Silence

Rating:
Summary: Tremendous fun!
Review: This was my favorite read of 2001. I hadn't ever read a book by Rose Tremain and merely picked it up because I was on my way to Copenhagen from London on a business trip. I became so involved with each of the characters that I made a special trip to the palace where the fictional story took place, bought postcards of the people on whom the fiction was I presume loosely based, and remembered parts of the book as I passed through the rooms. I also went up the round tower thinking all the time of the storyline in which this tower took part. What I think is so amazing though about this book is not just the historical details but the sexy sense of humor throughout, the understanding of music and the meaning of music in people's lives, and the author's wicked depiction of the king's wife. I really couldn't put it down, longed to get back to it when I did, and mourned the end of the story. I tried to get by book group to read it. It is definitely a book group read. So many characters to discuss; so much history; and so much interesting sexuality! The whole thing was just delicious reading!

Rating:
Summary: Tremendous fun!
Review: This was my favorite read of 2001. I hadn't ever read a book by Rose Tremain and merely picked it up because I was on my way to Copenhagen from London on a business trip. I became so involved with each of the characters that I made a special trip to the palace where the fictional story took place, bought postcards of the people on whom the fiction was I presume loosely based, and remembered parts of the book as I passed through the rooms. I also went up the round tower thinking all the time of the storyline in which this tower took part. What I think is so amazing though about this book is not just the historical details but the sexy sense of humor throughout, the understanding of music and the meaning of music in people's lives, and the author's wicked depiction of the king's wife. I really couldn't put it down, longed to get back to it when I did, and mourned the end of the story. I tried to get by book group to read it. It is definitely a book group read. So many characters to discuss; so much history; and so much interesting sexuality! The whole thing was just delicious reading!

Rating:
Summary: This book is at the top of my recommended reading list!
Review: This was the first book by Rose Tremaine that I've read and I thoroughly enjoyed every page of it! She is an extremely talented writer who brings you right into the time and place of the story and lets you get close to each character, no matter how minor in the story. I love the way she uses different points of view - first person for the King's wife and third person for everyone else. Although I hated to come to the end of the story, I couldn't wait to run out and get another one of her novels!

Rating:
Summary: Characters in Pursuit of Harmony
Review: Tremain plays with opposites and contrasts, point and counter-point. Intertwoven tales are composed of yearning and loathing, the magical and the mundane, expectation and dread, youth and age, imaginings and realities, miraculous and carnal -- the very stuff of life and death. The book is large, sometimes bawdy, often hilarious. Each character pursues his or her version of harmony. In one of the most striking and ironic demonstrations of power and creativity, Christian IV seems to have brought forth the music he adores from the stone floor of a palace state room. How has he produced this wonder? Dispatched to the cold, almost lightless wine cellar beneath, the orchestra plays the music they must, glorious sound that is conveyed to state room and ears by the King's cunningly engineered system of pipes and grates and ducts.

Rating:
Summary: Just a pleasure, a masterpiece, a real work of art...
Review: You wouldn't think the author of Restoration would be able to or need to outdo herself. You wouldn't think the Danish court of the seventeenth century would provide content for such a substantially lyrical and visually evocative narrative of sentiment. From King Christian to Peter Claire, his lutenist, to the men and women whose lives they touch and whose lives they are caressed by, Tremain describes her characters with the utmost sympathy and respect for their individual natures however foibled. Ultimately a brilliant tableau will present itself before the mind's eye that demands above all a celebration of life in all its forms and times, even down to the myriad tragedies of destiny. A personal and philosophical novel that transcends any limitations as "historical novel" and becomes a colorful treatise on the wonder of the human spirit. Sublime.