The Great Concert of the Night
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
A moving, dream-like novel about memory, love, and death.
David has just spent New Year’s Eve alone, watching Le Grand Concert de la Nuit, a film in which his former lover Imogen starred. In the early hours of the new year, consoled and tormented by her ethereal presence, he begins to write. What follows is a brilliantly various journal, chronicling a year in the life of a thinking man. David works as a curator at the ailing Sanderson-Perceval Museum in southern England, whose small collection of porcelain, musical instruments, crystals, velvet mushrooms, and glass jellyfish is as eccentric and idiosyncratic as the long-dead collectors’ tastes. David himself is a connoisseur of the derelict and nonutilitarian, of objects removed from the flow of time. Refusing the imposed order of a straightforward chronology, his journal moves fluidly back and forth in time, filled with fragments of life remembered, imagined, and recorded, from memories of his past life with Imogen or with his ex-wife, Samantha, to reflections on the lives and relics of female saints or the history of medicine. There are quotations from Seneca, Meister Eckhart, and the Goncourt brothers mixed in with the equally compelling imagined words of fictional film directors, actors, and, always, the fascinating Imogen, who is alive now only “in the perpetual present of the sentence.” In The Great Concert of the Night, Jonathan Buckley expertly interweaves sexual despair, cultural critique, the plot lines of one man’s quietly brilliant life, and the problems and paradoxes of writing, especially writing about and to the dead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This underwhelming American debut from British author Buckley follows a grieving man's yearlong journal. Late-middle-aged David, divorced and running the Sanderson-Perceval Museum of local history and scientific oddities, pedals back and forth across his life through a series of vignettes and ruminations centered on his former partner, actor Imogen. Now that she's gone, David revisits her work in several arthouse films as he tries to navigate his life alone, dealing with his ex-wife, his sister, and a transient young man named William whom Imogen encourages him to befriend. While David's takes on history and literature are insightful and often pleasurable to read, and his evolving, fatherlike relationship to William is moving, the narrator is a confounding character. He seemingly prefers to do nothing, to be alone with his work, and he grumpily disapproves of everyone from his ex-wife's new lover to Imogen's on-screen costars, whom he criticizes for overacting or lack of skill. The women in his life who all seem to adore him despite himself appear one-dimensional. Imogen, particularly, is distractingly precocious, and her dreamgirl qualities come across as ridiculous without adding anything to readers' understanding of David's psyche or his relationships with women. This novel is far too interested in its narrator's own supposed brilliance than in the concepts it pertains to be about.