Is Lightness of Being Unbearable?
I do not think so. But in my fiction, lightness is different from Kundera’s – a buoyant step, playfulness, facing difficulties with humour, courage and openness to open questions.
Janet Savin speaks about her forthcoming novel
Author Interview: Music for Three, Vol I
Reading a scene from Music for Three, Vol I.
Stand with Ukraine
My debut novel
Music for Three in a Prelude to Revolution
When she graduates from the Juilliard School in 1988, free-spirited Katherine Angelis balks at family expectations pointing to the rigorous life of the concert circuit. A grant to study the original of a composition by Dvořák gives her a year off in Prague –a city which her family fled after the Communist coup d’état four decades earlier.
Far from home, in a culture whose literature, art and music she has cherished since childhood, Katherine revels in speaking her ‘second language’ and the beauty of Prague. But her year of quiet reflection is complicated by a love triangle with an activist and a reclusive cellist. And she readily accepts the opportunity offered by her new Czech friends to join dangerous covert resistance against a hard-line regime in place since the ‘brotherly assistance’ of the Warsaw Pact invasion.
As she discovers new purpose translating and smuggling human rights reports out to the West and blacklisted books in, Katherine feels that opposing the kind of tyranny that has hurt her family and millions of others is a special kind of music…
Welcome!
Welcome. Have a look around. I hope you’ll feel at home. You’ll find book reviews, my non-fiction writing, and, when the Readers’ Circle goes up in the course of May, some short fiction and all kinds of other offerings as gifts. For the moment, blog posts are mostly on European politics, but they will treat many different subjects.
I’m partial to literary fiction, but I also love the cinema and have some training in the visual arts and art history. I’m fascinated by how different arts enrich each other. One of my favourite books (there’s a ton of them) is The Conversations, where Michael Ondaajte and Walter Murch compare editing novels and films, including the adaptation of Ondaajte’s novel The English Patient, and Murch’s work with Coppola – The Godfather I, II and III and Apocalypse Now. The ways that Cezanne’s painting influenced Hemingway’s style, Rilke’s thinking and Virginie Woolf still interests me, years after I happened on to them.
If such approaches appeal to you, I hope that you will enjoy visiting this site and possibly contributing. Wouldn’t it be stimulating and just plain fun to create a community of like-minded readers and explorers.