The Melody
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Harvest, Quarantine, and Being Dead, a tender new novel about music, celebrity, local intrigue, and lost love--all set by the Mediterranean Sea
Aside from his trusty piano, Alfred Busi lives alone in his villa overlooking the waves. Famed in his town for his music and songs, he is mourning the recent death of his wife and quietly living out his days, occasionally performing the classics in small venues--never in the stadiums he could fill when in his prime. On the night before receiving his town's highest honor, Busi is wrested from bed by noises in his courtyard and then stunned by an attacking intruder--his hands and neck are scratched, his face is bitten. Busi can't say what it was that he encountered, exactly, but he feels his assailant was neither man nor animal.
The attack sets off a chain of events that will cast a shadow on Busi's career, imperil his home, and alter the fabric of his town. Busi's own account of what happened is embellished to fan the flames of old rumor--of an ancient race of people living in the surrounding forest--and to spark new controversy: something must finally be done about the town's poor, the feral vagabonds at its edges, whose numbers have been growing. All the while Busi, weathering a media storm, must come to terms with his wife's death and decide whether to sing one last time.
In trademark crystalline prose, Jim Crace portrays a man taking stock of his life and looking into an uncertain future, all while bearing witness to a community in the throes of great change--with echoes of today's most pressing social questions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This haunting and transfixing novel by the British author of Being Dead and Quarantine is set in a world just parallel to our own, somewhere on the edge of a nameless sea. Widowed Alfred Busi, semiretired from a career as a world-famous musician, lives a quiet life in a villa until one night, after going outside to straighten up some tipped-over garbage cans, he is bitten on the throat and face by something "fierce and dangerous" that smells like potato peel. Busi's wounds, as well as those he sustains in a mugging the following day, raise questions and fears in the minds of the townspeople. Was he attacked by one of the fierce animals who live in the forest just outside the town's boundaries? Or by one of the homeless people who took up residence in a park? Or possibly, as an inventive journalist suggests, by a Neanderthal? In any case, the town, led by Busi's mendacious housing developer nephew Joseph, begins to takes steps towards ridding itself of any unsettling influences, evicting the homeless from the park where they normally sleep and where Busi was mugged. The novel, which is narrated by one of the town's nosy residents, takes place almost entirely during a few days, with a coda that indicates the repercussions several years later. Like the simple but subtle song from which the novel takes its title, the novel's effects linger, coloring the reader's feelings about the thin border between the natural world and human society.