{"id":465,"date":"2009-01-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-05T22:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=465"},"modified":"2025-05-03T14:00:18","modified_gmt":"2025-05-03T02:00:18","slug":"a-sonata-for-miriam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/01\/17\/a-sonata-for-miriam\/","title":{"rendered":"A Sonata For Miriam"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><strong>Linda Olsson<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><em>Penguin<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">Otago Daily Times, January 17th 2009<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\"><em>A Sonata for Miriam<\/em> is about silence, or more exactly the filling of silence.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">When violinist and composer Adam Anker\u2019s daughter Mimi dies, he finds himself confronting all the things in his life that remain unknown or unsaid.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Similarly, he never tells Mimi about <em>her<\/em> mother, despite her plaintive question \u2018Who am I?\u2019\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">After a year adrift in grief, he embarks on three projects intended to fill in the empty spaces and lead him home:\u00a0 A sonata for his daughter, the search for his parent\u2019s story (a trail begun on the day of Mimi\u2019s death), and a reconciliation with her mother, Cecilia.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">Adam\u2019s emotional and physical journey is deftly told and moving, his voice compelling the novel forward despite the \u2018secrets\u2019 he uncovers being well foreshadowed.\u00a0 Similarly, Olsson creates a vivid sense of place, be it Adam\u2019s 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.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size\">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.\u00a0\u00a0 I can\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Linda Olsson<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<p>Otago Daily Times review January 17th 2009<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[88,370,89,500,18],"class_list":["post-465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-88","tag-fiction","tag-linda-olsson","tag-nz-author","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1410,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions\/1410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}