The Gustav Sonata
The Sunday Times bestselling deeply moving novel set in Switzerland tracing a lifelong friendship shaped by love and silence
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Gustav Perle grows up lonely and watchful in post-war Switzerland, aching for a closeness his own mother cannot give him.
In a small Swiss town still marked by the moral compromises of the Second World War, Gustav finds the companionship he longs for in Anton Zwiebel, a brilliant, fragile boy whose music expresses what neither of them can say aloud. Their bond, forged in childhood in the late 1940s, deepens into an intense attachment that neither fully understands.
The Gustav Sonata follows Gustav and Anton through love, disappointment, and the slow realisation of what they have lost as a result of fear and restraint. Set between the 1940s and early 2000s, The Gustav Sonata is a twentieth-century historical novel that asks what it means to love someone you cannot fully claim, and whether tenderness can survive decades of silence.
‘A perfect novel about life's imperfection... Tremain is writing at the height of her inimitable powers’ Kate Kellaway, Observer
‘Tremain has the painterly genius of an Old Master, and she uses it to stunning effect... Glorious’ The Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tremain's (The American Lover) melancholic latest centers on the lifelong friendship between Gustav Perle and Anton Zweibel. The book begins in 1947 Switzerland with Gustav and his mother, Emilie, a selfish woman whom Gustav loves in spite of her inability to nurture him. He never knew his father, only that he died in the war. When Anton arrives at Gustav's kindergarten, and Gustav invites him home, Emilie says, "But of course he is a Jew... The Jews are the people your father died trying to save." Anton is a talented but nervous child whose well-to-do parents encourage his desire to become a concert pianist. The boys are inseparable, sharing many sweet moments that Tremain beautifully crafts. Like a sonata, the book is divided into three parts. The second section goes back in time to the war following Gustav's parents' tragic marriage and the unraveling that hardened Emilie's heart. In the last section, Gustav has become a lonely but successful middle-aged hotelier in his Swiss hometown. Anton, after years of teaching music, tries to rekindle his career as a pianist, with disastrous personal results. The great strength of Tremain's writing is her brilliant, uncanny ability to capture the interior life of a child and to celebrate the triumphs of the many older characters populating the final, redemptive portion of the novel as they "become the people always should have been."
