Nonfiction November Week 3 – Book Pairings

Week 3 of Nonfiction November is the always intriguing Book Pairings topic, hosted by Liz at Adventures in reading, running and working from home. Nothing had occurred to me as suitable pairings this year, until it did. Not once, but twice! Again, I’m taking the opportunity to combine this with #NovNov24 by pairing two short nf books with fiction ones.

Piano-related skills – Eaves and Miyashita

My first pairing is of a recent essay about composing for the piano during lockdown by a returning pianist, and a gorgeous novel about learning the art of piano tuning from a few years ago.

The Point of Distraction by Will Eaves

Eaves won the 2019 Wellcome Book Prize for Murmur, his superb novel based on the life of Alan Turing (reviewed here). During lockdown he was so distracted from writing that he returned to his other love, the piano, and he was inspired to write eight new pieces for it, finding it gave him a new focus. In this essay he describes the art of composing, and where it springs from, be it old notebooks, the birds outside, research and the simple love of skill.

The scores for the eight pieces he wrote are included in the book, together with QR codes to hear recordings of them. Personally, I found them too atonal and thus difficult, and decided not to attempt to play them, but I did appreciate their forms, which are often based on historic dances – from a jaunty galliard to a stately pavan.

I did enjoy Eaves’ writing about the subject though – here are a few quotes:

Hackwork never prevents better work happening. (It often turns out to be the better work: who doesn’t prefer Erich Korngold’s film scores, for The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk, to his art songs?) The danger, on the contrary, is that one stops paying attention to whatever it is one is doing and develops a fear of distraction.

Associations matter. Without them, where are we? Without them, where is the artistic possibility of imitation? Without them, Messiaen cannot claim of his vast, intricate piano cycle Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956-8) that ‘All here is truth, even the countryside with its accompanying sights, sounds, smells and thermal currents.’ Without them, Kate Bush’s swooping melodic lines do not follow the motion of a kite (in ‘Kite’). Without them lyrics are arbitrary; we don’t need Noël Coward’s words, and Prince’s erotic ‘Tambourine’ isn’t a funny, sexy, teasing evocation. Without them, John Cage’s ‘4’33″‘ is an absence, not a teeming presence. ….

With Liszt, as with Chopin, the mistake is to be bamboozled by virtuosity, which is not complexity. Oscar Peterson was a technically superb jazz pianist, and a tenth as interesting as Thelonius Monk.

Source: Own copy. TLS books, hardback, Aug 2024, 112 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s or Amazon UK (link will work) via my affiliate links.

Forest of Wool and Steel by Natsu Miyashita

When seventeen-year-old Tomura is given an errand to take a visitor to his school gym little did he know that the following couple of hours would change his life forever. In the gym is a grand piano, and the visitor, Mr Itadori is a piano tuner. Tomura stays and quietly watches the man at work, marvelling at the way he can coax beautiful sounds from the instrument as if coming directly from the mountain forests. Tomura has never touched a piano keyboard before, but the tuner’s skill and the emotions raised in him make him decide that he wants to become a piano tuner too. So Tomura leaves his small town by the mountains in Hokkaido for the piano tuning school on Honshu, returning after three years of study to gain an apprenticeship at the piano store back home, working with the three tuners, Mr Itadori, Mr Akino and Mr Yanagi. It’ll be a long time before he’s let loose on a client’s piano on his own, but the three men have much to teach him and he wants to learn.

I was fascinated to learn about piano tuning from this super novel. Miyashita builds an awful lot of technical information into the novel, but it never felt too much, or too esoteric for me. Tomura as a non-player is able to play the role of asking all the questions, and observe the skills of his lovable trio of mentors. I have learned so much from this novel – from how the orientation of the castors plays a role in the stresses on a grand piano’s soundboard to how the quality of the grass eaten affects the density of the sheepswool the felt hammers are made from. The differences between well-tempered and equal pitches (that’s a bit more complicated) and all kinds of things that can affect the tuning and timbre of a piano that a tuner can adjust for. I’d never really thought about the fact that tuners can tune to the player, not just the instrument and location acoustics.

Tomura’s search to find himself in piano tuning has a homespun philosophy about it that made this quiet Japanese novel a pleasure to read. It’s a positive story too, a tad slowburning but elegantly written. Some might find the detail on piano tuning too much – but I loved it and its gorgeous cover. (full review here).

Source: Own copy. Black Swan paperback, 218 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link.

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Evocations of London Life

My second pairing is of two books with contrasting pictures and styles of life in London.

In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Never have I read a book where the dialogue so perfectly captures the voices of its five protagonists as in Gunaratne’s debut novel from 2018 (reviewed in full here). Three young men, second generation immigrants from different ethnic backgrounds, Selvon, Ardan and Yusef are friends, hanging out to play football and listen to grime on their North London estate. They’ll be moving on soon, school just about done, each hoping to take a different path that will take them away from the area. The boys’ experiences contrast with those of two first generation immigrants: Caroline a refugee from the Troubles in Belfast and Nelson from the Windrush generation. Long-suffering both, they’ve seen it all before and know to be scared.

This gritty story full of mounting tension is told over an intense 48 hours. The five take turns to drive the narrative and the older characters’ stories flash back to their youth, when Caroline was leaving Belfast and Nelson setting sail from Monserrat for London. As it begins, the killing of a British soldier nearby has sparked riots across the city. Nowhere is now safe, particularly on the estate – there’s going to be a march going past between the estate and the mosque, and everything could kick off.

Gunaratne brings the generations together through their experiences of violence and extremism bound together with estate living, there’s a powerful sense of place. It all builds up to a devastating climax as the events spiral out of control. This is a tough, vivid, gritty and yes, daring debut novel that didn’t disappoint.

Guy Gunaratne, In Our Mad and Furious City (Tinder Press, April 2018), hardback, 304 pages.

Souvenir by Michael Bracewell

This is the first book by Bracewell that I’ve read, and it won’t be the last for sure. I think the quote on the front from Neil Tennant instantly sold it to me!

It’s a sort of memoir of London life in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I say sort of memoir, for although Bracewell recounts some of his own experiences during the period, it’s more of an impressionistic stream of consciousness list of observations and sounds as he travels around the city, like this quote from the opening pages:

… now, in dark rooms and basements, as shabby and basic as any rural church hall disco – here are young people dressed in knee breeches, white stockings and black pumps; collarless shirts of storm cloud grey, cheekbone triangles of cerise blusher, belted radiation suits, ruffs, robes and flounces and weird smocks and space quiffs, turbans, sashes, vertical hair, greased hair, sharp-creased US Air Force trousers; faces powdered white, plum-black lipstick, batwing swoops of silver-mauve eyeshadow, fading towards the temples . . .

I could just read pages and pages of this kind of listy observation. Well, I did – for he continues on in much of the same vein often. Flitting non-linearly around favourite haunts in the capital, there is also plenty of cultural comment. One section on the joys of the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, (I always preferred Tower Records at Piccadilly Circus personally!), melds into another of my own current obsessions (click here for more):

A glance at the television adaptation (like the Megastore, made in 1979) of John Le Carré’s novel of late Cold War espionage, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, is coldly articulate of the capital’s atmosphere and appearance – an ill, exhausted meanness – in the year Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister.
Cambridge Circus appears almost as rundown, surly and sourly populated as the Eastern European cities that the British spies of Le Carré’s ‘Circus’ are infiltrating; profession men of early middle age look prematurely aged, saggy jowled, hyper-tensile; their lumpy-haired juniors gone to seed already.

I could quote ad nauseam from this little book, it made that much effect on me. I was in my late teens – ie a student – for most of the time period it covers. I was at Imperial in South Kensington, and as a South Londoner who went to the West End and the City regularly before then too, I got to know most of the areas he covers really well – mostly through walking! I’ve seen some of what he saw too. It resonated, and some, even if our musical tastes are somewhat different. Such an evocative little book – I think it’ll make my year end best of.

Source: Own copy. White Rabbit hardback (2021), 124 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s or Amazon UK via my affiliate links (the Amazon link will work alhough crossed out – don’t know why it does that!)