How Is This Going to Continue?

by James Chapman

This unusual novel comes in the form of a musical libretto, written by a fictional composer before his death in the 1990's. After an introduction that gives us the bare outlines of his personal history, most of our knowledge of his inner life--his emotion at the death of his wife, and the way he is dealing with his own illness--comes to us from his libretto itself.

The libretto consists of dozens of scored quotations from outside sources (many of them invented) around the subject of death. Particular obsessions of the composer--the life and death of contralto Kathleen Ferrier, the illnesses of Leonard Bernstein, Glenn Gould, and composers Gustav Mahler and Alfred Schnittke, as well as Hindu poetry, German history and many other matters, provide the reader with a ghostly outline of the soul of a dying artist.

The most unusual formal innovation here is the musical scoring, indicated by columns--the density of simultaneous sung quotations will increase in moments of great emotion; spareness and "white space" become more common as hope recedes. We gradually get a sense of the composer as one who had already withdrawn from the world, allied only with the woman he loved. And we see what is left for him once he has lost her.

This edition is signed by the author, and is limited to 50 copies

Spiral-bound

Published May 31, 2007

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Carah Naseem]

Pah brilliant. Soooooo much pain.