Only Moments [Paperback]

Nick Oliva (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 9, 2007

This journey begins in the year 2020, with a romantic, surreal dream and the waking of one sixty-six-year-old widower Chris Vadia, a retired professional musician, and his sullen celibate perspective due to his wife dying fifteen years earlier. After establishing the human surroundings of the time period, we flash back to 1970 and find how he meets the love of his life while on a wild summer vacation driving through California. A beach in Big Sur is the dramatic background for the beginning of their impassioned romance. Time then shifts through their college days, marriage, their struggling and successes, parental deaths, their Carnegie Hall debut, and then the crisis of having grown so far apart despite being with each other constantly. Our unforgiving fate, the duality of technology and the commonality of human emotion throughout history tie into a tale of human devotion that eventually brings understanding and hope.

Product Details

• Paperback: 234 pages
• Publisher: PublishAmerica; First Edition edition (April 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 142417077X
• ISBN-13: 978-1424170777
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,110,387 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A Well-Choreographed Stroboscopic View of an Artist's Journey, November 20, 2007

By 

Malcolm R. Campbell "The Sun Singer" (Northeast Georgia) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Only Moments (Paperback)

When you watch a man dancing on a dark stage in front of a flashing strobe light, you see only moments of the dance. Nick Oliva has taken the defining, and often poignant vignettes, of musician Chris Vadia's life and choreographed them into a remarkable novel.

We begin in the future, after all of the moments are long gone--a coming-of-age car trip, first love, marriage, marital strife, a husband-and-wife performance at Carnegie Hall, the death of a spouse--and look at events so fresh they appear to be happening now! But they are of the past and cannot be changed, and they take us--along with Chris--figuratively back in time and where they dance before our eyes in perfect detail before we move on.

The struggling Chris we find within each moment of his life's journey is not the Chris observing his past from the perspective of a man who learns, is learning, actually, that his seemingly disparatemoments of joy and sorrow that appear to have been separated by time and space and vantage point are connected into a well-defined, sensible whole.

If you're a musician and/or if music impacts your life in meaningful ways, you will appreciate the impact of Oliva's experience as a musician on the piano/violin practice and performance scenes. But you'll also see as you read from moment to moment that music is one of several apt metaphors in "Only Moments." Life's moments are like the notes in a composer's great work in progress, a work that in spite of all the choices, false starts, crescendos, decrescendos, and improvisations, turns out the only way it possibly could have turned out.

"Only Moments" is the journey of a lifetime carried forward on the wings of Chris Vadia's stirring memories and Nick Oliva's stirring prose.

5.0 out of 5 stars Only Moments proved to be a Catharsis of Many of Life's Emotions, September 14, 2007

By 

Viva Vives (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Only Moments (Paperback)

Only Moments by Nick Oliva provides a Mind Transport from-and-to Reality. It is a Great Read filled with Creative Moments that transend generations! Only Moments

5.0 out of 5 stars "CLASSICAL" LOVE STORY., August 24, 2007

By 

RICK POLLARD "RICK P." (NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Only Moments (Paperback)

THE MAIN CHARACTER IN THE BOOK, CHRIS, GREW UP IN THE 60'S AS I DID WHICH MADE IT EASY FOR ME TO RELATE TO HIM AND HIS FRIENDS. HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE, ANGELA, EVOLVED INTO WHAT COULD BE A REAL LIFE MARRIAGE BUT WAS WRITTEN IN SUCH A WAY AS TO KEEP YOUR TOTAL INTEREST AS TO WHERE THEIR LIFE WAS GOING. A MUST READ FOR ALL PROFESSIONAL MUSICIANS. WHEN I FINISHED THE BOOK I FELT LIKE I WANTED TO READ IT AGAIN TO PICK UP ON LITTLE THINGS I MAY HAVE MISSED ON THE FIRST READING. HOPE TO SEE THE BOOK MADE INTO A MOVIE.