The Gustav Sonata

by Rose Tremain

Overview

A breathtakingly radiant story of an unlikely childhood friendship that survives the test of time.

Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem only a distant echo. An only child, he lives alone with Emilie, the mother he adores but who treats him with bitter severity. He begins an intense friendship with a Jewish boy his age, talented and mercurial Anton Zweibel, a budding concert pianist. The novel follows Gustav’s family, tracing the roots of his mother’s anti-Semitism and its impact on her son and his beloved friend. Moving backward to the war years and the painful repercussions of an act of conscience, and forward through the lives and careers of the two men, one who becomes a hotel owner, the other a concert pianist, The Gustav Sonata explores the passionate love of childhood friendship as it is lost, transformed, and regained over a lifetime. It is a powerful and deeply moving addition to the beloved oeuvre of one of our greatest contemporary novelists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393246704
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/27/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	48,584
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Rose Tremain's prize-winning books, including The Road Home, Trespass, Merivel, and The American Lover, have been published in thirty countries. Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and member of the Royal Society of Literature, she lives in Norfolk, England with the biographer Richard Holmes.

Editorial Reviews

…[a] remarkably interesting novel…Tremain's answer to the complexity, the variations, the unknowable elements in her story is to build the narrative like music: a sonata in three parts, set in different times. She lays out themes, she develops them, she repeats them until they sing a rather different song. A sonata is usually allegro, so for all the density of detail there's a cracking sense of pace, and the themes themselves are as haunting and sharply contrasted as they should be—love and lovelessness, heroism and banality, vision and narrowness…Tremain is one of those few writers you trust completely when she goes to any unfamiliar territory, historical or emotional.

The New York Times Book Review - Michael Pye

07/25/2016
Tremain’s (The American Lover) melancholic latest centers on the lifelong friendship between Gustav Perle and Anton Zweibel. The book begins in 1947 Switzerland with Gustav and his mother, Emilie, a selfish woman whom Gustav loves in spite of her inability to nurture him. He never knew his father, only that he died in the war. When Anton arrives at Gustav’s kindergarten, and Gustav invites him home, Emilie says, “But of course he is a Jew... The Jews are the people your father died trying to save.” Anton is a talented but nervous child whose well-to-do parents encourage his desire to become a concert pianist. The boys are inseparable, sharing many sweet moments that Tremain beautifully crafts. Like a sonata, the book is divided into three parts. The second section goes back in time to the war following Gustav’s parents’ tragic marriage and the unraveling that hardened Emilie’s heart. In the last section, Gustav has become a lonely but successful middle-aged hotelier in his Swiss hometown. Anton, after years of teaching music, tries to rekindle his career as a pianist, with disastrous personal results. The great strength of Tremain’s writing is her brilliant, uncanny ability to capture the interior life of a child and to celebrate the triumphs of the many older characters populating the final, redemptive portion of the novel as they “become the people always should have been.” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"[F]rom this tangled mess of human relations, Tremain draws a conclusion that is simultaneously straightforward and sweetly transformative. Like so much else in this compassionate and musical novel, it hits a perfect note."

The Telegraph

"[Tremain’s] expertise is evident in its gradual layering of personal history and its subtle mingling of lights and darks."

Wall Street Journal

"The Gustav Sonata is a work of extreme and painful beauty, the story of one profound love amid many failed relationships, and of the conflict between passion and self-control. Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists, and deserves, with this brilliant novel, to reach a wide new audience."

Salman Rushdie

"The Gustav Sonata is beautifully rendered, and magnificent in its scope. It glows with mastery."

Ian McEwan

"Tremain is one of those few writers you trust completely when she goes to any unfamiliar territory, historical or emotional… Tremain knows how to show all the terrible bleak things that can happen between mothers and sons… This most unconventional book offers no easy answer, which makes it as disturbing and electric as any high-wire act. "

The New York Times Book Review

"This is a perfect novel about life’s imperfection…What Rose Tremain understands, above all, is the tragedy of temperament and the way it plays havoc with choice… Tremain is anything but an indulgent writer and is, here, writing at the height of her inimitable powers."

The Guardian

10/01/2016
Young Gustav Perle is taught by his mother that he must "master himself" to be like the people of their homeland of Switzerland: strong, moralistic, and independent. To follow one's emotions only leads to heartbreak and bitterness. At age five, Gustav becomes friends with Anton, a piano prodigy from a wealthy Jewish family. While all of Europe is struggling during the years following World War II, the boys are not yet aware of the difficulties that their parents endured. Stepping back a few years, we learn the story of Gustav's widowed mother. Lust, trust, and betrayal have left Emilie Perle and her son bereft of love or hope. Gustav's friendship with Anton and his family provide the only light in his life. In the third movement of this "sonata," we see the friends in middle age, when Gustav owns a small hotel, always tending to the needs of others. Anton still thrives on music, yet a lifetime of stage fright has taken a great toll. VERDICT With delicate prose that so well captures the feelings of innocent children as well as conflicted adults, Tremain crafts an engaging, emotionally driven story that tugs firmly at the heartstrings. [See Prepub Alert, 3/28/16.]—Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L.

Library Journal

★ 2016-06-21
Like an intense, beautiful, and deeply moving piece of music, Tremain's captivating historical novel hits all the right notes.When we first meet Gustav, the protagonist of Tremain's (Merivel: A Man of His Time, 2012, etc.) exquisite novel, he is 5 years old and living with his none-too-happy widowed mother, Emilie, in their extremely modest apartment in the small Swiss town of Matzlingen. The year is 1947, and the postwar mood is grim, yet Gustav finds patches of color, flavor, and beauty in the drab, gray world he and Emilie inhabit: the dark purple of a nearly new lipstick he discovers in the gratings of the church he and his mother clean to supplement her income from working in a cheese cooperative; the taste of Emilie's knodel; the bloom of the cherry tree in their building's courtyard. Gustav's mother has offered him one chief lesson: he must "master himself," as, she says, his late father did before him. "You have to be like Switzerland," she tells him. "You have to hold yourself together and be courageous, stay separate and strong. Then, you will have the right kind of life." Into this relatively cheerless world walks Anton, a talented yet moody Jewish musical prodigy who becomes Gustav's most treasured friend. In concert with Gustav's story, Tremain, who won the 2008 Orange Prize for The Road Home, also tells that of his father, Erich, a strong, handsome assistant police chief who followed his conscience and his heart. Eventually, Gustav's lifelong friendship with Anton helps him to unlearn the stern lessons of his mother and unlock the secrets and yearnings of his own heart. Spanning the decades from 1937 to 2002, Tremain's novel is less sprawling than it is deeply intimate, a soul-stirring song about friendship, conscience, and love.

Kirkus Reviews