Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Publisher Description
This never-before-told story of the life and work of a (fictitious) musical phenomenon is "a revealing?and at times hilarious?satire of the music business, fame, and the cult of personality" (Clea Simon, Boston Globe).
Adrianne Geffel was a genius. Praised as the “Geyser of Grand Street” and the “Queen of Bleak Chic,” she was a one-of-a-kind artist, a pianist and composer with a rare neurological condition that enabled her to make music that was nothing less than pure, unmediated emotional expression. She and her sensibility are now fully integrated into the cultural lexicon; her music has been portrayed, represented, and appropriated endlessly in popular culture. But what do we really know about her? Despite her renown, Adrianne Geffel vanished from public life, and her whereabouts remain a mystery to this day.
David Hajdu cuts through the noise to tell, for the first time, the full story of Geffel’s life and work, piecing it together through the memories of those who knew her, inspired her, and exploited her—her parents, teachers, best friend, manager, critics, and lovers. Adrianne Geffel made music so strange, so compelling, so utterly unique that it is simply not to be believed. Hajdu has us believing every note of it in this slyly entertaining work of fiction.
A brilliantly funny satire, with characters that leap off the page, Adrianne Geffel is a vividly twisted evocation of the New York City avant-garde of the 1970s and ’80s, and a strangely moving portrait of a world both utterly familiar and like none we’ve ever encountered.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Music critic Hajdu (Love for Sale) dissembles with tongue firmly in cheek in his inventive debut novel, which takes as its subject the "Queen of Bleak Chic," a piano phenom who breaks out in the early 1980s after withdrawing from Juilliard. Pianist Adrianne Geffel has a neurological condition that enables her to express her feelings through music. Geffel emerges through an oral history told by her family members who reflect on her troubled childhood (she ran away at nine) and others. Many try to exploit her talent, such as a pompous fellow student at Juilliard who positions himself as her manager, or claim to understand it ("Readers interested in how musical art evolves... will be intrigued to read future pieces by me on Adrianne Geffel's music," writes a critic). After the oral accounts catch up to the height of Geffel's success in the mid-'80s, they turn to her disappearance at the age of 26 and gain greater poignancy. The author establishes Geffel's impact on American popular culture from the very beginning (one can be accused of "only geffelling," "over-geffelling," or "not geffelling enough"), which makes the various accounts of her credible and engaging all the way to the end. Hajdu's vigorous send-up of the late-20th-century music scene sings.
