Yearning

by Eugene Drucker

Overview

At thirty, Robert Markel can manage, at best, an ironic relationship with himself. He is a successful drama critic who had once hoped to create powerful original work for the theater. As the novel opens, he stares at himself in the mirror and suppresses an impulse to strike the sneering face that confronts him. His frustrations lead him to commit a serious breach of professional ethics. The narrative ranges from an early childhood accident through his mother's terminal cancer when the boy is twelve, and on to his idealistic, awkwardly fervent teenage years.

The first phase of the book culminates in his decision to carve out a new identity for himself, to depart radically from what his father had always expected of him. A chance encounter with his future wife is followed by a sad reconciliation with his father, who has begun to suffer from a wasting neuromuscular disease. After his father's death, Robert's professional and emotional life begins to unravel.

Yearning for fulfillment through art and love, consumed by the drive to create something where nothing had existed before, Robert tries repeatedly to fill the void left by an emotionally absent mother and a father who failed to provide unconditional love beyond his earliest years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781649790620
Publisher:	Austin Macauley
Publication date:	09/30/2021
Pages:	164
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.35(d)

About the Author

Eugene Drucker has received nine Grammys for his recordings with the Emerson String Quartet. As a violin soloist, he has appeared with the orchestras of Montreal, Brussels, Antwerp, and Jerusalem, as well as the American Symphony Orchestra and the Las Vegas Philharmonic. A graduate of Columbia University and the Juilliard School, where he was concertmaster of the orchestra, Mr. Drucker has recorded the complete unaccompanied violin works of Bach and the complete sonatas and duos of Bartók. His first novel, The Savior, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2007 and appeared in a German translation called Wintersonate. Mr. Drucker has set several Shakespeare sonnets and four scenes from Hamlet for voice and string quartet. His other compositions include At the Edge of the Cliff (five settings of poems by Denise Levertov) and Series of Twelve, a string quartet. He is Music Director of the Berkshire Bach Society's Bach at New Year's concerts, teaches at Stony Brook University and lives in New York with his wife, cellist Roberta Cooper.