Witty and playful, this novel sees the return of some of Barbara Trapido's best-loved characters from "Brother of the Famous Jack" and "Juggling".
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Barbara Trapido's golden novel about loss is an Alice in Wonderland for grownups. From its haunting start--"Early on in the morning of my interview, I woke up and saw my dead sister"--to its final, endless irony, The Travelling Hornplayer zips with plot twists and character turns, shocking revelations and desperate reactions. Any attempt at summary is dizzying, but here are a few hints: for three years, Ellen Dent has been devastated by the loss of her younger sister, who had struck famous novelist Jonathan Goldman as having "the pleasing air of one who plans to easily pass through this life, collecting admirers at tennis parties." Nonetheless, Lydia's charmed teenage existence had come to a quick end, courtesy of a car, outside Jonathan's North London flat after his daughter, Stella, turned her away, mistaking her for his mistress, Sonia. Sonia herself will later crop up in the Cotswolds as the temporary lodger of Jonathan's beloved wife--and I won't even begin to unravel Stella's super-disconcerting tale. I will, however, say that the book contains several other matchless, larger-than-life characters and strands, which mesh together into a sparky, tragicomic puzzle.
In Trapido's world all is not what it seems, to put it mildly. She is a gifted comic writer because she knows tragedy is just around every corner. Since 1982 and the publication of her Whitbread-winning novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack, her buoyant, allusive roundelays have proved that she has a knack for the ways gifted families work--and the ways they most definitely do not. She is also a brilliant commingler of life and art. Her third novel, Temples of Delight, is an inventive riff on The Magic Flute, while her fourth, Juggling (inexplicably, never published in the U.S.), sets forth a key Trapidian tenet, the superiority of Shakespearean comedy over tragedy: "Survival is admirable. It is more difficult than death, since it takes more energy and guile." The Travelling Hornplayer seems to have been inspired by both Conrad's Heart of Darkness and William Müller's lyrics, "which Schubert, under the cloud of his own recently diagnosed syphilis, managed so brilliantly to layer and elevate into a profound, bombarding symbiosis of love and death." This tantalizing novel is no less layered--though, given her comic genius, elevation isn't exactly Barbara Trapido's style. --Kerry Fried --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
A deliciously subversive British novelist who deserves a wider American audience, Trapido (Brother of the More Famous Jack) delivers a clever story of a group of people?in London, Cambridge and Edinburgh?connected by the accidental death of a teenage schoolgirl. When Lydia Dent contacts novelist Jonathan Goldman to ask his help in writing an essay on the poems of German Romantic Wilhelm Muller (set to music by Schubert as Die schone Mullerin), she unwittingly sets in motion a complex tragicomedy of errors that eventually brings together star-crossed characters: Lydia's sister Ellen; Jonathan's daughter Stella, who is Ellen's friend at Edinburgh University; Izzy Tench, a scuzzy yet brilliant painter who fathers Stella's child; Peregrine (Pen) Massingham, whom Stella marries; Jonathan's wife, Katherine, who befriends Jonathan's lover, Sonia, who is patron to Izzy; Jonathan's brother Roger, who late in the story falls in love with Ellen. Their lives intersect within a net of intricate yet plausible coincidences that, remarkably, rarely seem to be mere exigency of plot. One is reminded of a Shakespearean play where all the players keep bumping into one another in the magical forest. Only toward the end of the novel do the coincidental meetings stretch credulity a bit too far, but by then readers are likely to be snugly entrapped by the plot's momentum. As Trapido's characters experience love, loss, grief and plucky survival, the narrative twists are accomplished with a sleight of hand so subtle that the reader is often stunned. Trapido's dry wit and acerbic observations, especially of Britain's class system, are consistently engaging. Her depiction of Pen's very Catholic, very parsimonious, aggressively athletic Scottish family is worth the price of the book alone.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
i was hooked on it the moment i turned to the first page..,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Travelling Hornplayer (Hardcover)
This is my first Barbara Trepido book- And i'm absolutely delighted with it! The different storytellers in the book brings to life the plot with their personal narration. Each spin their part of the tale by recounting their life experiences, and this culminates in an intricately woven plot littered with unexpected revelations that fit perfectly together like lost pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. As the plot unfolds, the characters' lives unfold before us, and one cannot help but feel for them and even relating to them. Bizarre and almost exotic their lives may be, yet there are qualities in Barbara's characters that the reader can identify with. In the midst of admiring them for their talent and beauty, we pity Ellen for the loss of her sister; we wonder at, yet understand Katherine's maniacal zeal in caring for her daughter; we shrug at Stella's fragile sense of insecurity and over-commitment to her boyfriend. Barbara explores love, loss and betrayal, death, lonliness and ingratitude in her quirky and comical manner, interspersed with allusions to Wilheim Muller and Conrad which seem to be the connecting thread throughout the novel. The plot comes full circle, the ending even if a little too coincidental, pulls the curtains on this story to a splendid close, deserving of a standing ovation.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing, yet warm and personal - beautifully written,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Travelling Hornplayer (Paperback)
"The Travelling Hornplayer" is the first I've read of Barbara Trapido's and it won't be the last. It's such a pleasure reading this finely written yet understated gem of novel I didn't want it to end. It's hard to describe the type of novel TH is because it's got all the elements of mystery, intrigue, personal tragedy, loss and betrayal that provide the natural ingredients for a great novel but it is only in Trapido's expert hands that all these elements come together to produce a finely judged and balanced whole. The novel is personal, warm and engaging. Her characters - without exception, down to the minor ones - are brilliantly defined and come to life. They leap out at you from the pages like real human beings because they're neither good nor bad, just people with all their frailties. Recounted in flashback and by rotation through the eyes of Ellen, Jonathan and Stella, Trapido weaves together personal contemplation, plot development and social commentary into a complex mosaic of splendour and intrigue. Lydia, a ghost-like figure hovering over the proceedings, is the catalyst for the novel's dramatic development. She is also the glue that binds the loose pieces together. Trapido's genius is to engineer a denouement that is emotionally congruent, satisfying and uplifting. Amidst the avalanche of new titles being published each week, it is easy to miss this wonderfully little gem of a novel. It would have escaped my attention had it not won the Whitbread Prize award. Please don't miss it. "The Travelling Hornplayer" deserves to be read by all who love good literature.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From the first pages, this book was pure joy.,
By Kathleen Sullivan (Malibu, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Travelling Hornplayer (Hardcover)
I felt almost as thought P. G. Wodehouse had been reincarnated in the body of a 90's woman, so droll and sly is the humor and intelligence of the main characters, even as they deal with all the traditional and contemporary tragedies--accidental death, AIDS, crib death, suicide, dyslexia, adultery. The story revolves around the tragic death of a young girl, 17-year old Lydia Dent, and how each of the characters come to be directly or indirectly involved in her death, without realizing it or knowing each other until the beautiful tapestry of this plot brings them together. Excellent book
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
