5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
music and sensuality, February 22, 2005
This review is from: Beautiful Inez: A Novel (Hardcover)
An exciting and graceful novel engaging all your senses through music, wine, and eros. Schneider weaves his terrific knowledge of San Francisco, history of music, and remarkable people in a highly imaginative way, creating intrigues and suspense and erotic tension, so that despite the beautiful lyrical sentences (which are sometimes long but alwasy artfully wrapped up, like musical phrases in Beethoven), I read the novel anxiously, delighting in every turn of the events, and every strange detail--for example, a protagonist, blessed and afflicted with the perfect pitch, can't help himself but to analyze many sounds, assigning them C sharps, etc. I will reread the novel!
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"The acrobatics of living. A way to stay alive", April 12, 2005
This review is from: Beautiful Inez: A Novel (Hardcover)
Inez Roseman is a talented, comely lead violinist with the San Francisco Symphony. She's a stunning blonde, her hair brushed back with a silver comb at each temple, a square of silk between chin and violin. A high achiever, a dedicated wife and mother, Inez is also a beguiling mixture of the beautiful and the vulnerable. Lately, she seems to be drifting away from Jake, her charismatic husband, who works as a high profile San Francisco civil rights lawyer championing the cause on behalf of the Negroes, "a favorite of liberal columnists."
The Rosemans appear to be the picture of privilege, talent, and good fortune, but both are living under a veil of illusion, where the words "love me" might as well be grace notes, the tidy embellishments in an overture that reveal little of what follows. For Jake is actually a charismatic philanderer who has been cheating on Inez with Christine, a wealthy, bored Pacific Heights society lady. Meanwhile, Inez has become preoccupied with thoughts of suicide. There's a dreaded heaviness existing over her life, the insidious curse that has made palpable her inability to feel anything save her separation from the world. Jake, of late, just can't understand Inez' moods, and the staggering depth of her melancholy and grief.
When Inez meets Sylvia Bran, a waitress, showroom pianist, and self-confessed bohemian, Inez develops a severe and almost inexplicable attraction to her; "she's like a bride at forty surrendering to some unknown experience." And when Silvia comes to see Inez perform one night, she is instantly besotted with the dizzyingly beautiful violinist. Silvia's seduction is shockingly simple: basing her life on a series of lies, she masquerades as a journalist, first obtaining an interview with Inez, and than later seducing Inez at her rooms above the Hyde Street cable car line, "where the furnishings are a "blend of splintered wicker and discarded crates."
Silvia is a self-confessed eccentric who has learned how to enjoy the smaller pleasures of life. She progressively beguiles Inez with exotic food, scented candles, the music of Ravel, and of course, sex. Inez is at first hesitant, but she allows herself to fall in love with this eccentric and captivating younger girl. Inez has been so emotionally and sexually shutdown, and so seriously melancholic that meeting Silvia unleashes something profound inside of her. Inez sees Silvia as sincere as anybody she's known aside from her own children. She'd even hand Silvia her heart of she could and be done with it, and she honestly tells her that "you didn't steal my heart; I gave it to you freely."
But thoughts of suicide continue to haunt Inez, and it's as though her death wish seems inevitable. She feels she's coated with the weight of her own history. "A habit of abstraction. A habit of disassociation." Sylvia, for her part, is the language enthusiast whose obsession with words was inherited from her suicidal mother who "made a wall of language around herself." Her mother's preoccupation with taking her life infects the whole, ever-darkening and foreboding ambiance of this love story. The novel is filled with duplicity, neglect, evaporated love, and heartbreaking tragedy. But there also is loveliness, musical genius, and proudly realistic erotic love.
Setting the story in and around San Francisco in 1962, author Bart Schneider, not only imbues the narrative with world of classical music, but also situates events against the Cuban Missile Crisis and the steadily looming fear of war. This feeling of destruction, "the end of days" constantly haunts the characters in Beautiful Inez; they seem to throw themselves into hedonistically delightful pursuits with complete and utter abandon as though time is of the essence. Mixing the sexual with the musical, Schneider has written a sad, melancholic, but also extraordinarily beautiful love story, in which a woman drowning in sadness discovers sexual and emotional intimacy on a level that she never considered possible or even thought existed.
Beautiful Inez is a complex, rich, and ambitious book, but it is not without its flaws: some of the peripheral characters seem almost superfluous, and the narrative tends to lose some of its focus at the end. But Schneider's wise decision not to concentrate on the taboo-breaking aspect of the romance, gives the story a persuasive, affecting, and almost refreshing authenticity. He treats Sylvia and Inez as two emotionally honest women, who are, not by any stretch of the imagination, heroes or even gender-identified lesbians, but merely two lonely people who have found one another, and who just happen to be female. Mike Leonard April 05.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Exceptionally lovely!, October 3, 2005
This review is from: Beautiful Inez: A Novel (Hardcover)
It's not terribly difficult to understand why Mr. Schneider
gets the characters and the setting remarkably right. I read
this book shortly after it came out and a few days prior to
hearing him speak. He is an intelligent and caring soul
and this translates into his writing. I loved this book
because it has believable characters and it's the kind
of story that makes me ache. But perhaps my favorite part
is he gets the relationship between Inez and Sylvia
(friendship/lover) just right. You don't have to be
a lesbian to realize the nuances between these two women are
perfect pitch. This is the kind of book I sometimes carry
around just because!
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