My Mother's Music: A Memoir - Hardcover

West, Paul

4.67

6 ratings by Goodreads

9780670867578: My Mother's Music: A Memoir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670867578 ISBN 13: 9780670867578

Publisher: Viking, 1996

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

The author of A Stroke of Genius and Love's Mansion offers an intimate and loving portrait of his mother, her early life, her experiences during World War II, her love of the arts and sports, her witty observations on life, and her remarkable love.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From Library Journal:

Novelist West (The Tent of Orange Mist, LJ 8/95) most recently shared his tales of personal solicitude in A Stroke of Genius (LJ 11/1/94), depicting his affliction with and treatment for migraines and other illnesses. In his latest work of nonfiction, the elegant stylist mines childhood memories to create a charged, if bloodless, portrait of his first muse, his mother. A butcher's daughter who was forced to give up a promising career as a pianist, Mildred Noden West was a fierce, exacting mother who taught music to support her family in the small English mining town where they lived. West acknowledges that he is "packing words into the gap" in trying to write about her, since he is so close to his subject that he cannot convey who she was except in tight, allusive fragments-on her taste in classical music, her nimbleness with words, her "method," her "Mildredism." West has jealously excluded his father, the mere "sperm-bearer," and sister from his narrative, as together he and his mother traipse off hand in hand to the movies during the war while German bombs are dropping on London; together they uncover the "poetic in the barbaric." West's self-consciously Proustian narrative is tortuous and difficult and his vocabulary, as ever, gymnastic. For comprehensive literature collections.
Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this curiously disconcerting reminiscence, West, who won the 1993 Lannan Prize for fiction (Love's Mansion), struggles to understand his mother and her influence on him, but his effort founders in dense thickets of abstracted prose that conceals more than it reveals. "I sense[d] in her," he tells us, "an obtuse longevity sending an antenna forward into the unknown region where muscle dried, mucus thickened, and the brain scrabbled frantically to match cause and effect." He relates plainly enough the facts of her life: her background as a butcher's daughter, her love of music, her blocked career as a pianist, her devotion to him, her influence on his education. There is much talk of the composers she loved and of the awareness she imbued in him of a music in words. But neither she nor West is released from the welter of language into a satisfying portrait. Recognizing the trouble himself, he writes, at one point, "I could go on packing words into the gap, but she has to be recovered in action... Is she there?" It's hard to say yes.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.