The Train in the Night
A Story of Music and Loss
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 WELLCOME TRUST BOOK PRIZE
How do you lose music? Then having lost it, what do you do next? Nick Coleman found out the morning he woke up to a world changed forever by Sudden Neursosensory Hearing Loss.
The Train in the Night is an account of one man's struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion - and go one further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music, by going back to the series of big bangs which kicked off his musical universe.
The result a memoir not quite like any other. It is about growing up, about taste and love and suffering and delusion and longing to be Keith Richards. It is funny, heartbreaking and, above all, true.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Music journalist and first-time author Coleman's memoir of his sudden hearing loss in one ear, and his attempts to deal with a future in which the sound of music the thing he loves most has been irrevocably changed, is a fantastic, sad, funny, and, finally, optimistic view of his quest "to get the music back or at least to reconnect with it." One day while having tea with his wife, Coleman hears a soft "pffff" in his ear, like the sound "of a kitten dropping on to a pillow" a sound that evolves after a few days into a "wild humming" that resounds in his head "like the inside of an old fridge hooked up to a half-blown amplifier" and affects his ability to listen to his music. He spends three years adapting to his new condition during which time he seeks help from Oliver Sachs, among others. He also considers the ways his life has revolved around music and sound, and these meditations take up the bulk of his memoir. Coleman is remarkably adept at describing the moments of "hopeless disorientation" he experienced: "The reactive tinnitus took me close to the threshold of actual physical pain." He also provides hilarious and astute observations views of many of his albums, such as the Rolling Stones' Goat's Head Soup, which Coleman perfectly describes as sounding "exactly how a record made on a Caribbean island by a bunch of knackered tax exiles with unlimited access to drugs ought to sound."
