Love is Blind

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It’s also an early warning, though, one of the many instances in the novel that express the Boydian idea that the course of a life can change in an instant and everything can be lost in a heartbeat.

Yet much of the pleasure here is in the gleeful way that Boyd dares the reader to draw parallels with other works (including his own), before throwing in a surprising or audacious reversal. Throughout, there are hints of Chekhov – one of his most famous short stories “The Lady with the Little Dog”, the name Lika (in Googling that name, I discovered that Chekhov was also passionate about a singer named Chekhov), the Russian overtones. It means that he can escape the clutches of his unbearably grotesque, hypocrital and bullying preacher father, Malky.

Even if the chances of winning were genuinely 2-to-1 (in practice, roulette is biased to the house) the expected winnings are zero. He and his wife have a house in Chelsea, West London but spend most of the year at their chateau in Bergerac in south west France, where Boyd produces award-winning wines.

I got no real sense of obsession and I also found it completely un-erotic, despite some fairly graphic descriptions. It is the little details that provide the hook - like the skills of a piano tuner, and virtuoso pianist. It goes without saying that Chekhov’s short stories are far more meticulously made than they appear.

She is the reason the book has the title it does, because when it comes to her, his love really is blind. Despite its curiously bad title, this is an urbane, silkily written romance enlivened by late-in-the-day plot twists. In the late 1890s, Brodie Moncur is an expert piano tuner, working for a Edinburgh based piano manufacturer, and when the chance arises for him to move to Paris to try to reinvigorate their showroom there he grasps it with both hands.

I never felt, either, that these were people who had grown up in the Victorian period or late nineteenth century - the way they think, speak and act feels utterly contemporary. Interestingly, I find myself in the somewhat unusual position of loving a book more than many others on GR.You could say,’ Vere mused, ‘that, looking at it from one angle, you’re having an amazing Russian literary experience. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum. It is a novel with more than enough else in it—from early morning duels to extensive descriptions of restaurant meals—to keep readers absorbed. As Brodie and Lika travel around, the novel tells us "between them, they made a modest living, supplemented by their nights gambling with the martingale system in Biarritz’s casino.

Boyd was selected in 1983 as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' in a promotion run by Granta magazine and the Book Marketing Council. But life without Lika isn't really life, and Brodie is still young and impetuous, and more than a little naive. His is the art and craft not just of tightening an instrument’s screws, but also of subtly tailoring its mechanisms to an expert player’s strengths and weaknesses. If the Nicobars seemed strange and their beliefs outlandish, then so were ours, Brodie thought, seen from another perspective.I’d lived the life of these characters and at the end of both books I experienced a tearful moment when I reached the final page. this book offers a fascinating insight into how the instrument works and it also plays with the trope of tortured artistic souls albeit the elements that may seem half-familiar from the lives of genuine classical composers and performers are amplified in the case of the monstrous Kilbarron - if you like, he is John Field gone bad! So struck, in fact, that he invents a noun to describe the feeling: impendingment, and then an adverb, impendingmently, to qualify it. My sincere thanks to Penguin Books UK and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.