Linda Olsson
Penguin
Otago Daily Times, January 17th 2009
A Sonata for Miriam is about silence, or more exactly the filling of silence.
When violinist and composer Adam Anker’s daughter Mimi dies, he finds himself confronting all the things in his life that remain unknown or unsaid. Born in Poland in 1941, his mother (who fled with him to Sweden) refuses to tell him anything about his father or her own family. Similarly, he never tells Mimi about her mother, despite her plaintive question ‘Who am I?’
After a year adrift in grief, he embarks on three projects intended to fill in the empty spaces and lead him home: A sonata for his daughter, the search for his parent’s story (a trail begun on the day of Mimi’s death), and a reconciliation with her mother, Cecilia.
Adam’s emotional and physical journey is deftly told and moving, his voice compelling the novel forward despite the ‘secrets’ he uncovers being well foreshadowed. Similarly, Olsson creates a vivid sense of place, be it Adam’s Waiheke Island house, or the Krakow apartment where an old man nurses Nazi-looted artworks back to health before restoring them to their rightful owners.
Unfortunately, the final sections of the novel, in which Cecilia breaks her own self-imposed silence, strike a note of dissonance in an otherwise absorbing composition. I can’t help wondering if this transition might be more successful musically than textually, but Penguin NZ decided not to include a CD of the sonata that Olsson commissioned to accompany the novel.
Leave a Reply