Music, in a Foreign Language

by Andrew Crumey

Overview

Britain with the same post-war history as East Europe battling against a totalitarian regime. "The strikingly inventive structure of this novel allows the author to explore the similarities between fictions and history. At any point, there are infinite possibilities for the way the story, a life, or the history of the world might progress. The whole work is enjoyably unpredictable, and poses profound questions about the issues of motivation, choice and morality." The Sunday Times Music, in a Foreign Language won The Saltire Best First Book Award and launched the literary career of one of the UK's cleverest and most original post-modern novelists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909232389
Publisher:	SCB Distributors
Publication date:	05/13/2013
Series:	Original fiction In Paperback
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	243
File size:	444 KB

About the Author

Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He read theoretical physics and mathematics at St Andrews University and Imperial College in London, before doing post-doctoral research.
His first novel Music, in a Foreign Language (1994) was awarded The Saltire Best First Book Prize. His second novel Pfitz (1995) was one of the books of the year for The Observer and The New York Times. He published D'Alembert's Principle to great acclaim in 1996

Editorial Reviews

This intricate, demanding story of political and personal commitment and betrayal—which won Scotland's Saltire Prize for Best First Novel (in 1994)—introduces a young master of postmodernist irony who will remind many readers of several of the brainier postwar Eastern European novelists.

The setting is a futuristic Britain where "history" is expected to serve the interests of the state and all dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. A narrator whose relation to the novel he's writing is colored by his own complicated erotic life speculates on the motives (which appear similarly sexual) of his story's protagonist—who accepts open-ended possibility as proof of the genius of Alfredo Galli, an experimental writer whose work celebrates what might be called the principle of uncertainty. ("Galli had this idea that our whole life is just a story, and there are all these other ways the story could go, but somehow they get stolen from us.") Yet both writer and character seek a conclusive explanation of the mysterious, and perhaps not accidental, death in an "automobile accident" of the latter's father, Robert Waters, a historian unwisely involved with both a supposedly seditious publication and a physicist friend, Charles King, with whom he seems to have shared musical and amatory interests. All this is every bit as complex and teasing as it sounds, and the book's obsessive concern with the ethics and logic of settling for received wisdom is further elaborated by such amusing leitmotifs as King's unhappy acquaintance with a probably deranged pseudo-scientist determined to undermine the reputation of Albert Einstein and "the pernicious ideology of relativity." This is a genuine novel of ideas, more than a little disorienting in the early going, as we labor to understand how its several parts will intersect—and surprisingly stimulating and exciting, as we see how Crumey imperturbably puts it all together.

A formidable debut, from a writer whose possibilities, so to speak, seem virtually unlimited.

Kirkus Reviews

An intriguing and illuminating post-modern meditation on betrayal, death, and paths not taken, both personal and historical. Employing fiction within a fiction, Crumey constructs a philosophical jigsaw puzzle."

The Herald



"This intricate, demanding story of political and personal commitment and betrayal introduces a young master of postmodernist irony who will remind many readers of the brainier postwar European novelists. A formidable debut, from a writer whose possibilities, seem virtually unlimited."

Kirkus



"Music in a Foreign Language used the brilliant conceit of a Britain just

emerging from 40 years of polite Stalinism as a platform for some glittering intellectual fireworks."

Boyd Tonkin in The New Statesman

From the Publisher