“Still, we must keep an open heart. Not literally. That would be bad for one’s health.”
I’ve been recommending this one to people.
An alternate world with only one change: some people have The Gift, an ability to hear voices and sounds from the past. In London, there is an academy called Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which aids people with the gift. The woman who now runs it was once best friends with Selda Heddle, who grew up to be a renowned composer by using her Gift. One night, Selda’s grandson Wolf pitches up at the Hospice in a mental crisis brought on by his inheritance of the Gift.
That’s the set-up for a looped three-part novel about talents and afflictions, friendship and loss, hope and dreams, and the possessions of the creative urge.
She is torn between the desire to explain what she is trying to achieve with her music and a pre-emptive understanding that she will never be able to. She wants to unburden herself on how hard it has been to write it, and everything she’s written these last few years. Once, when she was young and lacked self-consciousness, she lived in a state of grace. Everything came easily, felt exploratory. The gift would guide her. It kept her company. Now, the gift hectors and berates. Each new piece is an arduous task, wrestling something unstable and invisible into form, like fitting the west wind into a duvet cover.
Fitzcarraldo rarely publish straight genre work, but make no mistake – this is a work of speculative fiction, and by any sane yardstick would be considered one of the best sf novels of its year. I loved it. The writing is exquisite, by turns precise and lyric, then loose and funny. It also sends you off to learn more about music. THE VARIATIONS is a hell of an experience, and, if you read it, remember I reminded you the structure is looped.
More often than not, we are born into the wrong family. That dissonance is a blessing and a curse, for it drives us to seek new ones, to build homes in other people.
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