Three Muses
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"...A meditation on history, music, the catastrophic inheritances of the Holocaust, and the so common, painful hiddenness of hope itself, THREE MUSES captivates the reader from the first page to the last." -Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of TINKERS and ENON
Three Muses is a love story that enthralls; a tale of Holocaust survival venturing through memory, trauma, and identity, while raising the curtain on the unforgiving discipline of ballet. In post-WWII New York, John Curtin suffers lasting damage from having been forced to sing for the concentration camp kommandant who murdered his family. John trains to be a psychiatrist, struggling to wrest his life from his terror of music and his past. Katya Symanova climbs the arduous path to Prima Ballerina of the New York State Ballet, becoming enmeshed in an abusive relationship with her choreographer, who makes Katya a star but controls her life. When John receives a ticket to attend a ballet featuring Katya Symanova, a spell is cast. As John and Katya follow circuitous paths to one another, fear and promise rise in equal measure. Three muses—Song, Discipline, and Memory—weave their way through love and loss, heartbreak and triumph, to leave readers of this prize-winning debut breathless.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Loss, memory, and romance are explored in Toll's bittersweet debut. In 1944, Janko Stein is an 11-year-old German Jewish death camp inmate who is spared because of his beautiful singing voice. That same year, in New York City, seven-year-old Katherine Sillman receives ballet lessons as a consolation after the death of her mother and later grows up to become an acclaimed prima ballerina, thanks to her Svengali-like choreographer, Boris Yanakov, who is also her lover. Janko, adopted by a New York City family after the war and renamed John Curtin, goes on to a psychiatric residency. In 1963, John and Katherine, now rechristened Katya Symanova, meet in Paris after John becomes entranced by her performance in Yanakov's Three Muses. Back in New York, the two of them begin a heated love affair, but will they ultimately be separated by John's survivor's guilt and Katya's allegiance to Yanakov? Toll is savvy in exploring how love can flourish in the face of trauma, but her theme is undercut by clichéd situations and dialogue ("You were born to dance"). Despite the pungent realism of the death camp setting and the vibrant depiction of the New York ballet scene, John and Katya feel a bit too wooden, with every emotion spelled out. It's an ambitious if uneven effort.
