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October 27, 2007
Ink on a pin / underneath the skin
I don’t want to get too homebody about this. But this (Saturday) morning, Edie and I were making apple-butter—an annual ritual, this year serving the green-apple harvest from the backyard—and she put on Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Yesterday, I read Andy Partridge’s liner notes to Judee Sill’s Heart Food re-release and so I figure it’s okay for me to admit that I know all the words to Mitchell’s album. . .
Hey, I’m still recuperating from the Frankfurt Book Fair trip, and it’s chilly here in Denver, and I can cocoon for a weekend if I want to.
What applies to this blog, though, is that I was reminded by the album that I’ve edited and published two novels driven by specific musical works. Marc Estrin’s novels are always informed by this passage or another from Ives or Bach or Zelenka (or others). I suppose there might be other writers who do something similar. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m referring to whole novels that take some sense of rhythm, pace, and timbre from a specific musical composition.
The more explicit of these two novels is a brilliant and moving search by a young man for a sense of self, Robert Ford’s debut novel, The Student Conductor. We published it at BlueHen, and if you don’t know it, you should find a copy. If I hadn’t just spent the year’s budget, indulgently driving through Alsace and Bourgogne for a week with my son, I might offer a money-back guarantee on that novel. But I did.
Anyway, I edited The Student Conductor listening to Brahms’ 2nd, again and again. The piece is pivotal in the protagonist’s crisis of the heart, and I felt that listening to Lenny’s version of the symphony was keeping me, as editor, from making any move that would compromise the emotion Ford was after. Or maybe it just enriched the reading experience. I’d never done that before, and now I wonder whether there are musical works that can naturally light particular novels. In any case, I can’t listen to Brahms’ 2nd anymore without thinking of Ford’s book. The novel seems to me a worthy offspring.
(I get to call him Lenny because I edited Estrin’s The Education of Arnold Hitler.)
The other novel I’ve edited that appears to be informed by a musical composition is Every Past Thing, by Pamela Thompson. But the informing is more indirect, and I didn’t know about it until a couple of weeks after the novel was in print. Over coffee in Providence, RI, the author told me that she had listened to Blue repeatedly during the months she was writing. The moment she said it, I could see it. Or hear it. That’s precisely the confessional-emotional timbre of the book that so enveloped me, its sense of loss and of willfulness in the face of that loss.
It appears that behind the novels I most love, not only can I see the movie, I can hear the soundtrack.
Fred
Posted 27 October
The Day the World Series comes to Colorado
Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog
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