Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance [Paperback]

Lloyd Jones (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 26, 2008

In tango, there are no wrong turns. But every dance begins with a backward step.

Taking his cue from the tango, the acclaimed author of Mister Pip has written a thrilling and sensuous novel about how we fall in love.

Ranging from rural New Zealand during the final days of World War I to Buenos Aires at mid-century to the present day, this masterful novel intertwines two love stories across three generations. The deep suspicions of an isolated community in the midst of war force Louise and Schmidt—two near-strangers—to hide in a cave overlooking the ocean. Desperate for solace, Schmidt teaches Louise the tango, and the iconic dance becomes their mutual obsession and the trigger for an affair that will span continents.

Years later, Schmidt’s granddaughter, keeper of the family secrets, owns a restaurant in Wellington where a shy young student named Lionel washes the dishes. One day she snaps her fingers in his direction and says: “I need to dance.”

Brilliantly evoking the seductive power of one of the world’s most famous dances, Lloyd Jones’s novel is a virtuoso performance.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jones (Mr. Pip) crafts a vivid tale of love and the redemption of dance. Argentinean piano tuner Paul Schmidt arrives in New Zealand near the end of WWI. He meets Louise Cunningham, who hides him when ruffians decide to kill Schmidt because his name sounds German. In their makeshift camp, Schmidt teaches Louise the tango. After Paul returns to Buenos Aires, he receives a letter from Louise, who admits she fell in love during their first dance. The pair keep their love alive through letters, even when they are oceans apart and eventually marry other people. The letters later provide clues for Paul's granddaughter, Rosa, who moves to New Zealand and is curious about Paul's mysterious past. Lionel, a university student and dishwasher in Rosa's restaurant, traces Paul and Louise's story, seeing parallels to his own ill-fated love for the older (and married) Rosa. Just as Paul taught Louise, Rosa teaches Lionel how to tango. With his elegant language, Jones moves gracefully between the two stories and time periods, capturing the sensuous interplay between partners in dance and in life. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

Shy New Zealand university student Lionel Howden takes a job as a dishwasher in La Chacra, a restaurant specializing in Argentine cuisine that is owned by the 36-year-old, married Rosa. She decides to teach him the tango, and their smoldering evening lessons soon leave Lionel in thrall to his employer, both on the dance floor and in the bedroom. She shares with him the history of her love of dance, telling him the story of her grandfather, Paul Schmidt, an itinerant piano tuner who was forced to hide out in a cave at the tail end of World War I with a local girl due to his German heritage. Paul and Louise turned the cave into a dance studio to pass the time. Their subsequent, years-long affair and their insatiable love of dance mirror the story unfolding between Lionel and Rosa. Jones, author of the critically acclaimed Mister Pip (2007), fills his novel with vivid, quirky details and graceful prose as he tells dual stories of seduction set to the sensuous music of the tango. --Joanne Wilkinson

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Product Details

• Paperback: 276 pages
• Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback; Reprint edition (August 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385342624
• ISBN-13: 978-0385342629
• Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 0.7 x 7.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #441,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "If you haven't fallen in love by the end of the dance you haven't danced the tango.", October 6, 2008

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (Paperback)

Lloyd Jones' HERE AT THE END OF THE WORLD WE LEARN TO DANCE follows a love affair that spans continents and decades that began during World War I in a cave in New Zealand when a young girl named Louise and a German piano tuner named Schmidt, whom she had hidden to save his life, dance a tango that lasts three minutes and fall immediately and forever in love. "She feels the piano tuner's hand arrive at the small of her back. The hand gives a little shove and resettles." Years later Schmidt's grandaughter, the sensuous Rosa, tells of Louise and Schmidt's great love affair to a much younger dishwasher-- he is 19; she is 36 and married-- Lionel who is besotted by her and who works in her restaurant where she teaches him the tango after hours.

Jones' novel teems with love, passion and ultimately great sorrow as, according to Ernest Hemingway, every love affair is tragic because it eventually ends in death. Louise and Schmidt's love story conjures up Hemingway's A FAREWELL TO ARMS, McEwan's ATONEMENT, Joyce's beautiful short novel THE DEAD, Marquez' tale of love in old age LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, even some of Robert Browning's poetry: "grow old along with me," for example.

Jones' haunting story of missed connections and love in old age really has no bad characters. Billy, for instance, the husband Louise leaves for Schmidt, is as decent a character as you are apt to find in any novel. In Louise's obsession, she goes to Buenos Aires where she never learns the language, hates Christmas because she always has to spend it alone and likes to meet Schmidt in later years on Sundays by the waterfront because she can see the horizon that reminds her of rural New Zealand. She has forsaken much, but she is saved from what Jones describes as a "wallpaper life." His description of her-- and much of his writing-- read like a prose poem: "Louise was usually the first one there [the waterfront]. There she is, sitting on a bench waiting for Schmidt to extricate himself from his comfortable apartment. . . He always hoped to see her first. Sometimes he did, and these days hobbling on bad knees he stops to squint into the untrustful distance, admiring the view. The way the river air pushes her skirt against her legs. To his eyes Louise is still young, forever young; the sight of her still excites."

Throughout these two love stories that have many parallels there is always of course the throbbing tango.

Highly recommended.

4.0 out of 5 stars unusual love story with tango as the central metaphor, September 21, 2011

By 

MV (East Bay, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (Paperback)

Argentinan Tango, according to author Jones, is about how you feel, and through Tango the characters in this somewhat confusing love story express their feelings to one another. This unique love story traces the relationships of primarily two main couples: Louise and Schmidt around WWI and Rosa and Pasta (Lionel) in the present day. But both love stories have side loves: Louise was originally married to Billy (and leaves him ultimately for Schmidt) but Schmidt is also married (Louise doesn't know this when she leaves Billy and travels across the world). Rosa is married to Ivan but is having a love affair with Lionel. While this sounds like the usual convoluted love triangles story, it is convoluted but it's not the usual. And it's the underlying tone as well as the underlying potential in several of the relationships that keep the story from being melodramatic.

The story is mostly told through the voice of Lionel who is a student in New Zealand and works at Rosa's restaurant. One night, Lionel is washing up late and Rosa, who is considerably older, asks him to dance. He is, initially, a horrible dancer but he begins to take dancing lessons and for the first half of the novel, Rosa and Lionel develop a dancing and talking relationship that only later turns to love. Lionel is a kind of unsympathetic character, which makes him unique. We don't know much about him except for his work with and love for Rosa and his distant relationship with his parents who he seems to be angry with. Lionel does not want to end up like them, living on their farm and tries hard to not get enmeshed in their difficulties, even when his father needs an operation. Rosa also isn't particularly sympathetic. She's a hard driving business woman who cheats on her husband who obviously loves her (but she feels he ignores essential parts of her). What's unusual is that these two main characters are, in many ways, "the bad guys".

Meanwhile, during Lionel and Rosa's relationship, Rosa tells the story of Louise and Schmidt. Schmidt was her grandfather. Louise and Schmidt met during WWII in a rather unlikely event but that ends up having them hiding with two Quaker pacifists (Billy and his friend). Out of boredom, Schmidt, a piano tuner, teaches them all to dance, and in the process they all fall in love with Louise. When Schmidt has the opportunity to leave, he basically abandons Louise and flees to Argentina only to discover he can't live without her. Meanwhile, she marries Billy. Louise and Schmidt start writing, and Louise starts dancing with her broom, learning the new steps he sends her. Billy realizes what's going on and basically tells Louise to go find her love and that he only wants her to be happy. Like Ivan, Rosa's husband, Billy truly loves his wife. Louise leaves, goes to Argentina only to find that Schmidt has gotten married to someone else and is having children. They start up a long term love affair.

What Jones does effectively is show the humanness of all of us. How love makes people do desperate and maybe selfish things but also, and more unusually, that losing the supposed "love of your life" is not the end of the world. Unlike some cheesy love stories, while things at the end "work out", they don't work out the way we would expect.

These two stories parallel throughout the novel and at times this gets confusing. Also, there are some plot devices that just don't work, but overall the novel does a nice job of showing how dance weaves a web around the people and also offers hope to those that get left behind. Without giving up the ending, the novel does not end on a depressing note, despite the dissolution of the major love affairs. And through dance, love lives on.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bland, July 12, 2010

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Bad Biker Bill "zakdog" (M&Mville) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (Paperback)

This is what is written on the back cover of this book. "Taking his cue from the tango ,the acclaimed author of Mister Pipp has written a thrilling and sensuous novel about how we fall in love."
C'mon now , how about some truth in advertising. I found none of the three elements mentioned anywhere during my reading of this book. Lets start with thrilling. Was it the very long tedious section where four of the charachters were hiding in a cave ? I don't know who was more bored during the cave ordeal. The cave dwellers forced to stay in their cave with little to do all day , the monotony dragging on seemingly forever or me , the reader , forced to read about their ordeal while the monotony did drag on forever. Maybe the author thinks despondency is thrilling. Next up is sensuous. No , not here. Bland is how I felt about the charachters ,their developement and interactions. Perhaps it was in the dance that the author thought he was conveying sensuality. The dance descriptives barely went beyond "...and then they danced...". Lastly , falling in love.I must have missed this part. I know I read the whole book , didn't skip a page but I don't recall anybody falling in love , being in love or talking about love. All they did was dance. Is this love ? Is this sensuous love ? Is this thrilling sensuous love ? This is an example of how bland this book is. This is an example of how the author thinks we fall in love. " He notices that she is young and healthy looking. She looks good in her denim jeans. Wait a minute , other men are noticing this as well. I better marry her." Is your heart beating faster now ? Is there a bead of sweat on your upper lip ?
I kept readin this book hoping that the bouncing from generation to generation and location to location would somehow mesh and the story would have a coherent conclusion. It didn't. What a waste of time. A complete tangoed mess.