but Emilie had told him not to waste her time with silly questions. Gustave could remember asking Emilie who had eaten the slice. The symbol for Matzlingen was a wheel of cheese with one slice cut out of it. Sometimes, Emilie would take Gustav’s hand and guide it to the north bank of the river where Matzlingen was marked in. On the wall of Gustav’s tiny room was a map of Mittelland, which displayed itself as hilly and green and populated by cattle and waterwheels and little shingled churches. Tremain paints her picture of post-war Switzerland with care and steadiness, and the reader can’t help but surrender to the landscape and the authorial voice. The first section of the novel-movement, I want to say-begins in Switzerland in 1947 with a young boy named Gustav Perle and his mother, his “Mutti,” Emilie, a widow living on a shoestring. At last, a book that shares my enthusiasms!) (I am so happy to have discovered a contemporary book that mentions Beethoven and Thomas Mann. Beethoven titled the three movements just so: Das Lebewohl, “The Caring and Heartfelt Farewell,” Abwesenheit, or “The Absence,” and Das Wiedersehen, “The Return,” which should be played with liveliness, which is to say vivacissimamente. Reference to Beethoven’s Les Adieux (one of my favorites of his piano sonatas) is made in more than one place, and the very structure of the novel echoes the structure of the sonata. Again and again, I found myself compelled to consider and test the statements and conclusions characters offered.

The characters are complex, beautifully detailed, and utterly believable-so believable that it seems strange to use the word characters. Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata: A Novel is a marvel.

The gustav sonata by rose tremain