So far, there’ve been only positive reviews of my debut novel The Hands of Pianists. (I wouldn’t dare to predict that negative ones won’t come!)
The book has been out a little over a month, and four critiques have been especially satisfying.
Peter Craven’s rave, which I’ve written about already, is stupendous. My book is ‘virtuosic in its technique and grand in its achievement’, he wrote in The Weekend Australian. It’s written with ‘absolute gravity, grace and a moody, constantly surprising sense of wonderment’. It broke every rule about art that Craven knows and ‘gets away with it’. Me, the writer, is ‘tough, he’s rugged, he’s often tracing the contour of a blackness of soul at the edge of hysteria or over it — but what a writer’.
I’m especially heartened to read Terry Pitts’s online review in his excellent literary blog Vertigo Vertigo (wordpress.com). I know of no more intelligent, graceful and erudite writing about high literature than his. In particular, Terry pays attention to fiction that embeds photographs and is post-post-modern in its focus on books that are discursive, blend fact and fiction, and are influenced by W. G. Sebald’s four priceless works. Terry read my book in ‘two non-stop sittings, fascinated and ready for more’.
He says, ‘Downes takes the reader into the minds of pianists to explore what music and performance means to them. […] He writes about stage-fright, pianists’ hands, the quality of different pianos, recorded music, and much more, in addition to writing about the aesthetic qualities of music.’
Diana Simmonds in Limelight, an Australian magazine about the arts The Hands of Pianists (Stephen Downes) (limelightmagazine.com.au), wrote, ‘Downes’s narrative is a gadfly series of leaps and bounds through time, space, geography and the world of concert pianism. [The] idea of the grand piano as homicidal is a novelty and Downes pushes it as far as it will go and then some more.’ And in The Age, the Melbourne newspaper institution where I spent quite a few years, and the Sydney Morning Herald Cameron Woodhead described my book Book reviews: My Daughter’s Wedding; The Hands of Pianists; The Breaking; Still Alive; Grimmish; Ryan’s Luck; A Decade of Drift; One Italian Summer (smh.com.au) as a ‘globetrotting journey […] ruminating on the nature of music, of sacrifice, and the lives of artists, as the psychological motives of the narrator become clear’.
The Hands of Pianists is readily available online at a variety of prices.