Product Description

Revealing a Paris both elegant and tawdry, this novel opens during the French bicentennial celebrations of July 1989. It concerns the affair of an American woman with Stephane, a brilliant, though drunken, violinist, and depicts her efforts to save Stephane from his wife, "The Monster".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3798843 in Books
• Published on: 1994-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
There is something quite musical about Andreacchi's (Give My Heart Ease) second novel, not in the hyperbolic critical sense but in the actual construction. A fugue appears early on with the subject (a young boy whose bruised face makes the narrator leave Boston for Paris) being followed a few pages later by the counter-subject (the bruised face of her needy Alsatian lover, Stephane). Added to such compositional notions are certain leitmotifs-glass, man-eating birds, blood, martyrs. At heart, though, this is a love story between the narrator and Stephane, a violinist who can't seem to drag himself away from his abusive wife. While her writing is often worthy, Andreacchi might have been better off trying something simpler than a book based on interwoven intellectual conceits. Her brittle, bloodless, aesthete heroine (evidenced by the leitmotifs above) is common and the pretensions are largely predictable ("`Don't you even know Peter Jennings?' I had to admit that I did not.'') or surprisingly middle-brow (like the cliched references: ``in the light of 1066 and all that the date alone certainly gives one pause. A little pause is certainly called for in which to remember Duke William, newly King of the sceptr'd isle, bringing fire and the sword and the Norman way with towers to the green and pleasant land.'') Although this may not have been the best forum, still Andreacchi shows promise.

Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Remarkable accomplishment
Music for Glass Orchestra is an ambitious, and remarkably successful, book. It deals with history, music, architecture, love in many forms - human and divine, perfect and painfully incomplete. The novel's narrative structure is rich as well as complex and Andreacchi's prose is truly poetic. The author's remarkable imagination and erudition are used to great advantage.

Reviews for Grace Andreacchi's Music for Glass Orchestra
The great success of this novel is not so much the characters but the wild, often beautifully surreal, linguistic music that orchestrates our narrator's telling of their lives....The amazing sonority of Grace Andreacchi's prose... Music for Glass Orchestra is in some ways about the vitrifications of our minds, how these glass harmonicas should be played, should perhaps be shattered and used to cut ourselves open again.
- Review of Contemporary Fiction, June 1993

Communing with the spirit of Peter Abelard in the Père Lachaise cemetery, our heroine meets a boy from Kansas who has come to worship at the tomb of Jim Morrison, and takes him home. A fragmentary message on her door summons her to Venice to dine with a count who might be Dracula; musing, she recalls how Gustav Mahler once appeared to her in a New Hampshire supermarket ... her melancholy lover gets lost on the Métro and is menaced by wolves and men in green turbans ... Andreacchi's kaleidoscope of jagged emotions, sexuality and schizophrenia blends the American Dream and old Europe in a surreal story in which her wit consistently entertains.
-The Sunday Times, 12 September 1993

The narrator of this wildly surrealistic novel is an American woman having an affair with Stéphane, a drunken, a drunken French violinist who specialises in the baroque repertoire. If she spent more time caring for him instead of imagining that she encounters Mahler in the supermarket, impressing us with her knowledge of the Queen of the Night's tessitura, and being snide about standards at the Metropolitan Opera, would it still have ended with her and Stéphane boating on a mountain lake while the clouds sing the slow movement of Schubert's C Major Quintet? Probably.
- The Sunday Telegraph, 22 August 1993

Soaked in light, this is a delicate mingling of perception, experience, fantasy and magic. It casts myriad reflections of Paris in the life of a woman who has escaped from the suburbs. Some of them are to do with her lover, a drunken married musician whom she loves for his baroque musical brilliance. Some are to do with the mysteries of the mind which take her into stranger realms of myth where she encounters fictional characters in the flesh. It's a graceful, rather beautiful book -- airy rather than airheaded, sexy in a cerebral sort of way and more dreamlike than dreamy. Music for Glass Orchestra flows in and out of different states of reality and seeps into the reader's mind like a half-remembered song.
- Northern Star, 15 July 1993

... it ultimately proved to be an interesting and intellectually stimulating novel.
- Event, August 1993

...a glittering heap of rubble ... clear flashes of an interesting intelligence at play.
- New Statesman, 13 August 1993

The hard-boiled, self-mocking female narrator saves her admiration for a church tower and her body for lachrymose violinist Stéphane ... Surreal encounters all point to the same message: she must learn to put her hand in the fire -- a metaphor, apparently, for surrendering to the truths articulated by the masterpieces (the Goldberg Variations, the Prague Symphony, Beethoven's G major sonata) Stéphane plays. Oh for a good musical education.
- The Independent on Sunday, 8 August 1993