Garner, Helen. The Children’s Bach. Pantheon Book, 1984.
Reason read: May is music month but there is not much in the way of music in this book.
Within less than two hundred pages Helen Garner has managed to condense a complete picture of the institution of marriage. Dexter and Athena Fox had a steady, quiet relationship. They went for long walks and coexisted in relative peace. That is, until along came Elizabeth, a former friend of Dexter’s from college. They hadn’t seen each other in years, but without warning Elizabeth started shaking up their lives with her rock musician boyfriend and his teenage daughter in tow. Suddenly, Athena was seeing the world through a different lens and started to wonder if she made the right choices early in life. Her marriage. Her lifestyle. Her future. It as if Athena experienced a mid-life crisis of epic proportions.
Quotes I had to acknowledge, “In this frame of mind, savage with homesickness and loneliness, she roamed the city, daring it to tackle her” (p 36). So beautiful. And this was, that made me laugh, “He was chucking a mental” (p 130).
Confessional: Gaps in the dialogue make the action jumpy. When did Dexter agree to give Elizabeth and Vicky a ride? One minute they are in the airport, the next they are traveling in a car.
Author fact: Garner published many of her journals. She also wrote Monkey Grip which is on my challenge list.
Book trivia: the foreword forewarned of the numerous characters. Indeed. Athena. Dexter. Arthur. Billy. Elizabeth. Vicky. Philip. Poppy. The fact that the book made Rumaan Alam want to go for a run is intriguing. Supposedly she hates to run.
Setlist: Ravel’s Bolero, La Traviata, Haydn, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”, “The Wild Colonial Boy”, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”, Steve Winwood, Elvis Presley, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Mary Ford and Les Paul’s “How High the Moon”, Don Giovanni, “The Vicar of Bray”, “Jerusalem”, Mikrokosmos by Bela Bartok, Bach’s Small Preludes, Kabelevsky, and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”.
Nancy said: Pearl admitted that The Children’s Bach was old and hard to get a copy of.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Australia, the Land of Oz: Fiction (p 26).
~*LunaSea*~ 