Interesting books, and news items about books and periodicals, particularly with respect to political and social issues. Since May, 2016, many of my larger book reviews have been put on a hosted Wordpress site; so now this blog emphasizes previews, interviews with authors, booklets, large periodical articles, and literary business issues. Note: no one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!
Friday, October 04, 2019
"The Seven Symphonies: A Finnish Murder Mystery" maps a novel plot to a composer's lifetime output
While I was at the Finnish American Heritage Center in
Hancock MI on Monday morning, I visited the bookstore next door, and (besides
Sept 30 posting) a very intriguing book I picked up is “The Seven Symphonies: A
Finnish Murder Mystery”, by Simon Boswell, by Booklocker publishing, 2005, 450
pages, paper.
The story considers the serial murder of musicians in modern
day Helsinki.The chapters of the book
are named after the seven symphonies of Jean Sibelius, and the subchapters are
named after the movement tempi.The most
triumphant of the set is #2 (which I got to know as a senior in high school, as
I did the First, and then the Fifth).The sixth is like Vaughn Williams, and the Seventh is famous for its one
movement.
There is an eighth chapter based on a hypothetical eighth
symphony, and the coda for the novel is the quiet “Tapiola”, Op. 112.
I guess Jan Sibelius's lifelong compositional output became a "process piece" that in his own mind became progressively "less bad" (famous 2015 twitter gem).
The book also appears to represent a genre of "Nordic murder mysteries", like the Danish "Smila's Sense of Snow" which became a 1997 film which ends in Greenland (climate change?) with alien overtones.
The book might have relevance because a mysterious assassination of journalists in a small town of Imatra, Finland, on the Russian border in Dec. 2016, about 140 miles north of St. Petersburg.
I had named chapters of my handwritten apocalyptic novel “The
Proles” after music tempi in 1969.
I did visit the museum (morning of Monday Sept. 30) as an unattended
walkthrough.Inside the main work room,
people were doing crafts and a teenager was sewing the seams of his own shorts,
an odd sight.
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