Love is Blind

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The best and the worst moments of his life take place in the northern city and in the countryside at their summer retreat, the violent emotions and bloody confrontations a true reminder of the greatest moments of classic Russian literature. I will try not to spoil them, but like a musical theme in a symphony, a simple country song that Brodie wrote down for Lika in Paris will haunt their every moment of illicit happiness. Boyd, William (24 December 2017). "Bethany on Jura by William Boyd: an original short story". The Observer . Retrieved 13 March 2018.

In the Andaman Islands, Brodie finds some peace and some perspective, as he embarks on an etnographic study of the aboriginal tribes from the islands. He has gone to the end of the world, but what he needs to look at is right there in his heart.Lika Blum is a Russian actress and singer, moderately talented. She's also the mistress of John Kilbarron, the first famous pianist to accept Brodie Moncur's sponsoring contract. But the heart moves in mysterious ways. A further complication is the discovery that Brodie is suffering from an incurable disease, the bane of the nineteen century – tuberculosis. The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth; Viking Press, 2017. This includes "The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth" (short story), first published in Notes from the Underground, 2007 [24] Where, you begin to wonder, is Boyd going with all this? Why, without Brodie being aware of it, is his life absorbing details from Chekhov’s? Is it a literary game, or something more? The characters were a little bit flat in my opinion. The love in the title really is blind, cause the two main characters meet once and are already in love, but I can get over that, it seems believable considering the strong passions of that time. Love was very different from what we experience today, and at the same time purer, in my opinion. Blau, Eleanor (21 May 1983). "New Territory for Explorer in Fiction". The New York Times . Retrieved 10 March 2018.

Well, there are ways to write about physical love, lust and desire but this isn't it - for me, at any rate. Boyd's prose is no more than workmanlike in this book which manages to be both bogged down in detail (why do we need to know precisely which brand of cigarettes each character smokes? Oh yes, because Boyd researched them) and simultaneously skim the surface when it comes to the personal relationships supposedly at the heart of this book. 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. Overall, a pleasant but not particularly stimulating read. 3 stars less one for the dubious scriptural and mathematical references. Whilst in Paris, Brodie becomes involved with a famous, virtuoso pianist, John Kilbarron, his lovely young partner Lika Blum (a Russian opera singer) and his malevolent brother Malachi ......... relationships that will become deep and tangled over the years. In the book, the theme of perception, of seeing things as they really are, is foremost with the inner workings of a piano acting as a masterful metaphor. The whole-life novel is also a clear act of colonisation – by fiction – of what we now call life-writing: biography, autobiography and the intimate journal. But in fiction there is a different kind of authority. It is all, paradoxically, true – because it’s been invented by the author. Other forms of life-writing are highly suspect and partial. Donald Rayfield, Chekhov’s great biographer, has defined biography as “a fiction that has to fit the documented facts”. Beyond the documented facts the biographer cannot go or can only tentatively speculate. Not so in the whole-life novel. The fundamental “truth” of a life in fiction is guaranteed – this is it, this is what happened, this is what this person felt – and these novels exploit and relish that trust from the reader absolutely.

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Not for the first time he gave thanks to the universal nature of his profession. Wherever there were pianos he could find work, one way or another."