From the Publisher
Paolo Maurensig's first novel, The Lneberg Variation, was hailed worldwide as an immediate classic. Now Canone Inverso-the classic tale of the doppelgänger reimagined-has confirmed Maurensig's reputation as a modern master.
In an isolated Austrian music school in the 1930s, two boys, each struggling with the burden of talent and the curse of obsession, become locked in a complex friendship. The key to their bond lies in the secret of a beautiful, strangely carved violin. As their lives unfold through the most violent decades of this century, the two become companions, rivals, and, inevitably, lethal enemies. With Canone Inverso, Paolo Maurensig delivers a powerful metaphysical thriller, culminating in a devastating finale.
Jonathan Keates
...[T]he story is steadily turned inside outproducing a solution of sorts — though one that leaves us feeling distinctly uneasy....Drawing on the artistic techniques of both the 18th and the 19th centuries[Maurensig] pronounces a gloomy verdict on the various types of human alientation created by the 20th. —The New York Times Book Review
Book Magazine
In this story within a story within yet another story, a world-weary musician tells of his tortured and lonely childhood in Hungary and then near Vienna at a horrible prison of a music school. The gifted lad plays a precious antique violin, his only link to a long-dead, unnamed father. At school, he befriends a young Austrian baron whose family may hold the key to the secrets of the young Hungarian's own past. How had his father, a man of mysterious origins, ever come by this heirloom violin?
Maurensig's elevated prose deftly recalls that of English-language Gothic writers, most notably Edgar Allen Poe; the intricate plot and hoary, angst-ridden narrator strengthen the resemblance. Given this direction, one can forgive the lack of character development, but not the lack of suspense. A very capable example of a genre that is more than a hundred years old, the book adds nothing new. Maurensig does make nice use of detail, particularly in establishing setting, and the ending (a good surprise) makes everything nearly worthwhile.
Angela Bowman
Publishers Weekly
As he did so effectively in The Luneburg Variations, Maurensig uses the device of a narrator who opens the novel and immediately gives way to another narrator, who spins a convoluted story within a story, leading to a surprising denouement. Again the time frame is the 1930s and '40s in Hungary and Germany; and though the words Nazi and Holocaust are never mentioned, the cataclysm to come is the subtext in a mesmerizing narrative. A mysterious stranger in contemporary London tells a man who has bought a rare 17th-century violin about the instrument's former owner, Jeno Varga, a brilliant Hungarian musician. In 1932, with his unknown father's violin his only legacy, Varga surmounts his illegitimate birth to win acceptance to the Collegium Musicum, a highly competitive music school outside Vienna. The Collegium is a Kafka-esque institution: the students are treated as prisoners subject to military discipline; they are systematically humiliated and subjected to mental torment. At the top of his class, Jeno finally feels fulfilled when the equally talented and charismatic Kuno Blau becomes his best friend and, in many ways, his doppelganger. When Kuno invites Jeno to stay at the family castle near Innsbruck, however, Jeno is subjected to a nightmare of intimidation and derision. His friendship with Kuno diminishes into a frightening reversal of itself, a canone inverso. It is obvious to the reader, though not to Jeno, that the outside world is descending into its own spiritual death. The complex fugal themes of Maurensig's plot touch on such questions as the essence of musical genius ("The true musician is a descendant of Cain"), the search for immortality in artistic creation and the growth of evil beneath the carapace of respectability. Some of the narrative is heavy going, as Maurensig's ponderous symbolism and metaphysical exploration threaten to overwhelm the plot.
Library Journal
In the opening pages of this complex yet beautifully rendered new work, a man who has just bought a violin at Christie's is accosted by a stranger with a fantastic tale: he once met a remarkable street musician in Vienna who owned this very violin. Named Jen Varga, the man had inherited the violin from the soldier who left his mother pregnant, and he was talented enough to be accepted at a conservatory that turned out to be horrifically strict. There he befriended Kuno Blau, scion of an aristocratic family, and was invited to spend the summer at the family's castle. At the castle, the friendship entered a "canone inverso"--a downward path--and a terrible secret regarding Jen 's violin is revealed. But is the story true? The man tries to verify it and finds that Jen has been dead for years. So who was the street musician? And whatever happened to the castle's old lord, who, it is hinted, is not really dead? Maurensig (The L neberg Variation, LJ 8/97) sets up a delicious mystery and encloses it within a meditation on music, its true nature (who is the real musician--Kuno, who possesses his music, or Jen , who is possessed by it?), and its role in society (the Nazi menace rumbles throughout). Highly recommended wherever good literature is read.--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Jonathan Keates
...[T]he story is steadily turned inside out, producing a solution of sorts -- though one that leaves us feeling distinctly uneasy....Drawing on the artistic techniques of both the 18th and the 19th centuries, [Maurensig] pronounces a gloomy verdict on the various types of human alientation created by the 20th. -- The New York Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
An alluring allegorical second novel, from the late-blooming Italian author of The Luneburg Variation, employs three skillfully interconnected stories to tell a vivid cautionary tale about the nature of geniusand the varied powers of musicto console, ennoble, and destroy. An unnamed narrator fortuitously purchases a priceless violin he has long coveted, then is visited by a distraught writer who confesses his yearning to possess the instrument, then tells the narrator its "story." He has learned it from Jeno Varga, an itinerant Hungarian musician whose own history encompasses a motherless youth and enduring emotional detente with his businessman stepfather, precocious virtuosity and an enlightening apprenticeship at "the most important music school in Europe" (the monastic, prisonlike Collegium Musicum), and a transformative extended visit to the lavish castle owned by his friend and fellow violinist Kuno Blau's Addamslike family. As Jeno's disturbing intimacy with the Blaus simultaneously excites his imagination and challenges his dearest preconceptions, his (always unstable) intimacy with the mercurial Kuno begins its destructive canone inverso (in musical terms, a reversal, or descent). In McPhee's admirable translation, this agreeably convoluted novels clever misdirections and urbane romanticism recall Isak Dinesen at her most appealing. Jeno's artistic and personal crises climax in the years just before Hitler assumes power, and a dazzling climax and denouement unravel the manifold mysteries of the Blaus, reveal the (inevitable) identity of the narrator (long since absent from the storytelling), and ironically demonstrate the truth of Jeno's rueful contention that "The truemusician is a descendant of Cain." An elegant Chinese-box entertainment (and incidentally a great improvement on Maurensig's intriguing but flawed first novel), which will remind many readers of the intellectual thrillers of Spain's Arturo Pérez-Reverte, and leave them wondering why even more fiction of this kind isnt being written these days.
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