Review 523: The Prague Sonata

The Prague Sonata by Bradford Morrow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My favorite of the year! At least for fiction.

Update: July 2015:

This book was one of my favorites of 2024. At the time, and often, I seem to have a hard time writing some notes about my favorite reads. So here goes another attempt. 

The book has a bit of a mystery about an old sonata. Meta was given just a part of a sonata. Since she can no longer perform as a profession, she went on a search for the other two pieces. Well, she did get a little obsessed by this piece of music, knowing there was more and wanting to hear it, understand it.

 A large part of the book takes place in Prague, and Morrow did an excellent job of writing the feeling of that old city. I could see the place.  No other fiction book I’ve read (so far) has done such a good job of placing the setting. 

The writing was clear. There is a bit of relationships with Meta, one that had a falling out and another that began. Then there was also the music. One of those books I wished I could hear what was being talked about. 

I don’t know much about classical music, but apparently it was a long piece of music with three sections, or parts. They were split apart in Prague during WWII, the owner of the piece, Odylie, had married a Jewish man, Jakub.  When the war broke out he immediately became part of the resistance. Odylie wanted the music to survive, to save it from plundering, so she split it apart, kept the  first part.  She gave the second part to her best friend, and the last went to her husband. However, since he was in the resistance she could not see him directly, it was given to an intermediary and she hoped it found it’s way. Then Odylie left Prague for England.

In the modern time, it was a mystery for Meta trying to find the three pieces of music: where were they, what happened? The book gave us the past, so we knew more than Meta on what had happened, but the past was also revealed slowly so there was still some unknown aspects. Another mystery was who actually wrote this masterpiece of music?  Was it Beethoven, was is someone unknown genius in music, or was it more modern than it appeared?

I put off reading this one for a while (about six years) because of its length, while it took some time to get through it, I did not mind as I savored the book. One of the better fictional books I’ve read in a while.