Customer Reviews

The Lost Stradivarius

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The ghost story is by & large ideally realized as a short story or at most novella -- the greatest masters, such as M. R. James, never even attempted the novel form; & those who did both short stories and novels, such as E. F. Benson, only the short stories are of outstanding merit. At novel length they tend to bog down considerably or else descend into tedious gothicisms & inessential asides. But Falkner's THE LOST STRADIVARIUS is a perfect gem of a novel, a timeless tale of weird & awe inspiring ghostliness, easily in the top ten of Victorian ghost novels, in an unfailingly elegant style.

-Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Violet Books

John Meade Falkner did not seem to consider novel-writing the most important thing in his life; he wrote three novels in a matter of less than ten years, and spend the rest of his life as an antiquarian, a librarian, and the top executive of a major munitions manufacturing firm. But the three Gothic novels he wrote are all one of a kind and were written with an incredible sense of surety and deftness. THE LOST STRADIVARIUS is a beautifully constructed ghost story, concerning a Victorian Oxford student and music aficionado who discovers an eighteenth-century Italian musical suite; when he plays a certain section of it with his friend in his rooms in Magdalen Hall, a presence seems to stir around them. This only starts the tale, which manages to synthesize a fantastic array of fin-de-siecle concerns, including homoeroticism (as Tom Paulin suggests in his brief foreword to this nice little Hesperus edition, the figure of Oscar Wilde surely haunts this work as much as the fictional ghost of Adrian Temple), decadence, anti-Catholicism, and Paterian aestheticism. The great pleasures of Falkner's fiction are his striking ability to convey atmosphere and his precocious gift for showing and not telling when it comes to character and suspense.

Read this book in one afternoon sitting, really enthalled with story line. Imagine relatives and an adult friend telling you about the Father you never met. Hard to imagine this author only wrote 3 books for publication but given all of the other things he accomplished in his life it is understandable. Meant to excell at everything he set his hand and mind to accomplish and did so! You will have to work through turn of the century phrases and terms but then that is the case with any book from this era. In addition to everything else it was FREE! I am older (66) so might appreciate this more than younger generation but will meet all the desires of any avid reader.

Not the greatest story ever, but for fans of Moonfleet who wish to see another facet of John Meade Falkner mind, it is well worth reading.
It is a strange, sometimes eerie story, which will keep your attention until the very end.