More About Elise Blackwell...
An Unfinished Score
By Elise Blackwell
Published By:
Unbridled Books, April 2010
About the Book:
As she prepares dinner for her family, Suzanne hears on the radio that
a jetliner has crashed and her lover is dead.
Alex Elling was a renowned orchestra conductor. Suzanne is a concert
violist, long unsatisfied with her marriage to a composer whose work
turns emotion into thought. Now, more alone than she's ever been, she
must grieve secretly. But as complex as that effort is for her, it pales
with the arrival of Alex's widow, who blackmails her into completing the
score for Alex's unfinished viola concerto, threatening to reveal the affair to
Suzanne's husband. As Suzanne struggles to keep her double life a secret from her husband, from her best friend, and from the
musical world—including the tight knit musical community of Princeton, NJ, where she lives and works with a chamber
music quartet—she is consumed by memories of a rich love affair
saturated with syncopating rhythms and, increasingly, is manipulated by
the widow.
This is the story of love, loss, sex, vengeance, and betrayal, a psychologically compelling novel exploring the relationships among women as friends and rivals and what it means to make a life of art.
The book is beautifully researched and the language
describing the music is truly lyrical.
Ms. Blackwell has this to say about music and its role in her work:
I have listened to and loved music all my life, and one of my earliest disappointments was the discovery that I lack musical talent...I’m intrigued by the ways that different art forms are and aren’t alike, particularly the ways that writing and musical performance differ. “Music of war” means two things for me: music written about war and music played during war. Rarely these coincide, such as in the performance of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony in Leningrad during the siege, but often the music that helps people endure suffering does so because it captures our highest aspirations and intentions.
About the Author:
Elise Blackwell, originally from South Louisiana, is the author of
three previous novels:
Hunger, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, and Grub.
Her books have been selected for numerous "best of the year" lists, including The Los Angeles Times, Sydney
Morning Herald, and Kirkus. Her short stories and criticism have appeared in Witness, Topic, Seed, Global City Review, and Quick
Fiction. She currently is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and recently has been named Director of USC's MFA program in creative writing.
| Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society 624 Pirate’s Alley, New Orleans, LA 70116 phone: (504) 586-1609 or (504) 525-5615 fax: (504) 522-9725 info@wordsandmusic.org |
||