What do you think?
Rate this book
Distant Music: A Novel
In a love story spanning six centuries, Lee Langley creates four vivid worlds. Magically linked, each grips and fascinates in a novel of love, loss, and time.
The story begins in 1429 on Madeira, an island consumed by a fire that has blazed for seven years. A peasant girl of fifteen meets a boy - a Jewish outsider - off a Portuguese sailing ship. Esperanca yearns for knowledge; Emmanuel opens her mind to other worlds. The lovers know they must part when the ship sails. From that first meeting and parting, others follow.
Portugal, with its golden light, wildflowers, and vineyards, is the setting. Emmanuel is in turn a sailor, printer's apprentice, book seller, and musician. Esperanca, seen first as an illiterate peasant girl, is next encountered as a spoiled daughter of Faro's privileged class; then a clever, bookish woman dangerously involved in a string of murders in nineenth-century Lisbon. In present-day London she is a woman who has lost her memory, fleeing from an unnamed threat.
Each time Esperanca meets Emmanuel there is a spark of recognition, an intimate conversation resumed across space and time. Each time their love is set against the perilous history of the Jews in Portugal. Like a symphony in which movements reprise and enlarge their themes, the book builds to a harmonious and satisfying conclusion. Lee Langley masterfully depicts the struggle to define identity against swirl of history. Over the centuries the lovers face peril, tenderness, horror. What survives is love.
The story begins in 1429 on Madeira, an island consumed by a fire that has blazed for seven years. A peasant girl of fifteen meets a boy - a Jewish outsider - off a Portuguese sailing ship. Esperanca yearns for knowledge; Emmanuel opens her mind to other worlds. The lovers know they must part when the ship sails. From that first meeting and parting, others follow.
Portugal, with its golden light, wildflowers, and vineyards, is the setting. Emmanuel is in turn a sailor, printer's apprentice, book seller, and musician. Esperanca, seen first as an illiterate peasant girl, is next encountered as a spoiled daughter of Faro's privileged class; then a clever, bookish woman dangerously involved in a string of murders in nineenth-century Lisbon. In present-day London she is a woman who has lost her memory, fleeing from an unnamed threat.
Each time Esperanca meets Emmanuel there is a spark of recognition, an intimate conversation resumed across space and time. Each time their love is set against the perilous history of the Jews in Portugal. Like a symphony in which movements reprise and enlarge their themes, the book builds to a harmonious and satisfying conclusion. Lee Langley masterfully depicts the struggle to define identity against swirl of history. Over the centuries the lovers face peril, tenderness, horror. What survives is love.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published August 30, 2001
8 people are currently reading
154 people want to read
About the author
Lee Langley
27 books15 followersAward-winning novelist and travel-writer, Lee Langley was born in Calcutta in the late 1930s, of Scottish parents, and she spent most of her early childhood there. Her parents separated when she was 4, and she spent the next 6 years travelling through India with her mother, where she got caught up in the Indian independence riots. Her family returned to the UK as feelings rose higher against the British. Lee Langley has since written of a sense of loss and exile from a place that she had loved as a child. She won the Writers’ Guild Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Lee Langley has also written film scripts and has adapted novels for TV. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is also an active committee member of the P.E.N., the writers’ organization that campaigns for freedom of speech internationally. Lee Langley is married to the novelist Theo Richmond, and lives in Richmond in London.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 20, 2011
Lee Langley is a British writer. I have previously read and enjoyed Changes of Address (1987) and A House in Pondicherry (1995) but somehow missed Persistent Rumours (1992) the middle one in the prize-winning trilogy set in India where Langley was born. These books are now out-of-print, which is a pity.
Distant Music is a departure not only in setting but also in style. If the cover makes you think of historical chick-lit, think again, because it's more adventurous than that. It's a story that spans six centuries, featuring separate but linked stories about Esperança and Manuel:
in 1429 as a peasant girl and a sailor in Madeira;
in 1489 in Faro, Portugal, as a rich girl and a printer of maps;
in 1855 in Lisbon as a bookish recluse and a bookseller; and
in 2000 as a disorientated middle-aged woman and a jazz musician.
The constant thread in the book is the persistence of frustrated love.
BEWARE: SPOILERS
The peasant girl Esperança yearns to learn to read the Hebrew Bible that Manual the Jewish sailor shows her, but it is not to be. She stubbornly refuses an offer of marriage, hoping Manual will return. She makes a life for herself by trading her body for grapevines so that she gradually acquires a vineyard and economic independence. The child she bears to her tormentor dies, so there is no issue.
Yet later that century Esperança is a rich girl in Faro and somehow she 'recognises' Manuel who this time is a printer. To her father's dismay she leaves his house of luxury and converts to Judaism - and is then forced to flee when Jews are expelled first from Spain and then from Portugal. Esperança throws herself and her sole remaining child from the ship rather than submit to the captain's lust, so once again there is no issue.
(By coincidence I read Distant Music the same day that I saw the film Sarah's Key and was struck yet again by the way Europe has for centuries tried to expel Jews from its borders. Sarah's Key is based on French complicity in the Nazi genocide of the Jews; the expulsion of the Jews in Distant Music is based on historical facts in Spain and Portugal.)
Part 3 is also based on historical fact: there was a sort of Jack-the-Ripper preying on washer-women in Lisbon in the 19th century. In Langley's story the yearning to be educated reaches fruition for this Esperança - she shares her love of books with a bookseller who is accused of the crime so again class differences and religious persecution intervene. She has no children either.
Although each story has puzzling references into the past, each is separate and absorbing. Once you surrender to the strangeness of it, the narrative works though there is a persistent sense of melancholy foreboding and you know things will end badly.
It's when the millennium year bleeds into the stories from the past that it becomes surreal. In Part 4 Esperança was nicknamed Essie at school in England; as an adolescent she re-names herself Hope but in this story she is a middle-aged woman searching for identity and for her memories as she flees through busy London pursued by Mel (Emmanuel). The style of dialogue and setting is in marked contrast to the historical elements of the book and it's (deliberately) quite disorientating.
It is in Part 4 that at times the pervasive thread of the Jew-as-Outsider threatens to overwhelm the story, particularly when the young people discuss Israeli politics. Langley's characters are relaxed about religion and there are tentative attempts to explore modernity v tradition, a vexed issue for Jews because they are still in recovery from the Nazi attempt to exterminate their identity forever. However it seems to me that there is a bit too much going on in Part 4 - perhaps this was meant to mirror the millenium angst of the period but the multiple examples of angst are too many for the author to explore properly or resolve.
Still, this was an interesting book to read and has reminded me to keep an eye out for Langley's books at the library.
Cross-posted at http:anzlitlovers.wordpress.com and scheduled for publication there on Jan 25 2011.
Distant Music is a departure not only in setting but also in style. If the cover makes you think of historical chick-lit, think again, because it's more adventurous than that. It's a story that spans six centuries, featuring separate but linked stories about Esperança and Manuel:
in 1429 as a peasant girl and a sailor in Madeira;
in 1489 in Faro, Portugal, as a rich girl and a printer of maps;
in 1855 in Lisbon as a bookish recluse and a bookseller; and
in 2000 as a disorientated middle-aged woman and a jazz musician.
The constant thread in the book is the persistence of frustrated love.
BEWARE: SPOILERS
The peasant girl Esperança yearns to learn to read the Hebrew Bible that Manual the Jewish sailor shows her, but it is not to be. She stubbornly refuses an offer of marriage, hoping Manual will return. She makes a life for herself by trading her body for grapevines so that she gradually acquires a vineyard and economic independence. The child she bears to her tormentor dies, so there is no issue.
Yet later that century Esperança is a rich girl in Faro and somehow she 'recognises' Manuel who this time is a printer. To her father's dismay she leaves his house of luxury and converts to Judaism - and is then forced to flee when Jews are expelled first from Spain and then from Portugal. Esperança throws herself and her sole remaining child from the ship rather than submit to the captain's lust, so once again there is no issue.
(By coincidence I read Distant Music the same day that I saw the film Sarah's Key and was struck yet again by the way Europe has for centuries tried to expel Jews from its borders. Sarah's Key is based on French complicity in the Nazi genocide of the Jews; the expulsion of the Jews in Distant Music is based on historical facts in Spain and Portugal.)
Part 3 is also based on historical fact: there was a sort of Jack-the-Ripper preying on washer-women in Lisbon in the 19th century. In Langley's story the yearning to be educated reaches fruition for this Esperança - she shares her love of books with a bookseller who is accused of the crime so again class differences and religious persecution intervene. She has no children either.
Although each story has puzzling references into the past, each is separate and absorbing. Once you surrender to the strangeness of it, the narrative works though there is a persistent sense of melancholy foreboding and you know things will end badly.
It's when the millennium year bleeds into the stories from the past that it becomes surreal. In Part 4 Esperança was nicknamed Essie at school in England; as an adolescent she re-names herself Hope but in this story she is a middle-aged woman searching for identity and for her memories as she flees through busy London pursued by Mel (Emmanuel). The style of dialogue and setting is in marked contrast to the historical elements of the book and it's (deliberately) quite disorientating.
It is in Part 4 that at times the pervasive thread of the Jew-as-Outsider threatens to overwhelm the story, particularly when the young people discuss Israeli politics. Langley's characters are relaxed about religion and there are tentative attempts to explore modernity v tradition, a vexed issue for Jews because they are still in recovery from the Nazi attempt to exterminate their identity forever. However it seems to me that there is a bit too much going on in Part 4 - perhaps this was meant to mirror the millenium angst of the period but the multiple examples of angst are too many for the author to explore properly or resolve.
Still, this was an interesting book to read and has reminded me to keep an eye out for Langley's books at the library.
Cross-posted at http:anzlitlovers.wordpress.com and scheduled for publication there on Jan 25 2011.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 12, 2019
This is a series of novellas that are love stories between a Christian women and a Jewish man all set in a setting of Portuguese persecution of Jews.
The whole book is an illustration of “saudade”.
“This untranslatable Portuguese term refers to the melancholic longing or yearning. A recurring theme in Portuguese and Brazilian literature, saudade evokes a sense of loneliness and incompleteness. Portuguese scholar Aubrey Bell attempts to distill this complex concept in his 1912 book In Portugal, describing saudade as “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present.”
I found the lack of resolution frustrating and unsatisfying.
The whole book is an illustration of “saudade”.
“This untranslatable Portuguese term refers to the melancholic longing or yearning. A recurring theme in Portuguese and Brazilian literature, saudade evokes a sense of loneliness and incompleteness. Portuguese scholar Aubrey Bell attempts to distill this complex concept in his 1912 book In Portugal, describing saudade as “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present.”
I found the lack of resolution frustrating and unsatisfying.
May 31, 2023
So glad I read this after returning from Portugal last month. The repeated references to fado and saudade helped me understand the Portuguese people better. I could see the azulejo and the beautiful sidewalks.
The dreamy sense of time in the book is also appealing to me. We are all more closely connected than we know.
The dreamy sense of time in the book is also appealing to me. We are all more closely connected than we know.
February 12, 2019
Loved this book. I really have trouble reading fiction. It kept my interested all the way through. I really enjoyed the overlapping story lines and history. :)
March 11, 2017
3.5 stars. I read this because I'm going to Portugal soon and want a "feel" for the country's people and history. This book definitely gives one a view of history from the 15th century to the beginning of the 21st, particularly that of the Jewish people in Portugal. The love stories were quite haunting, especially the first two. For Esperanca and Emmanuel, there is a spark of recognition, but no memory each time they meet in a new, different time.
November 7, 2022
A fascinating read.
May 20, 2015
Can't think why I added this to my To Read List - but there it is, number 4 out of 100s to catch up on. It may have been because I enjoyed Ferny - a love story across the centuries.
This has a similar theme, although much more disjointed.
Its four stories - starting out in 15th Century Madeira, where a young lady falls in love with a Jew.
Then the time frame jumps on - a few years to the expulsion of Jews from Iberia, to the 18th Century and finally the present time.
The characters losely join the story up, basically its a love story with reincarnation as a theme, with the same souls falling in love at different periods.
The first couple of stores resonated well, with the drama of a flight from religious persecution but by the third story, it badly lost its way.
Last story, set in 20th Century London, completely passed my by and the relevance of the entire work was lost on me.
Turned into a chore.
This has a similar theme, although much more disjointed.
Its four stories - starting out in 15th Century Madeira, where a young lady falls in love with a Jew.
Then the time frame jumps on - a few years to the expulsion of Jews from Iberia, to the 18th Century and finally the present time.
The characters losely join the story up, basically its a love story with reincarnation as a theme, with the same souls falling in love at different periods.
The first couple of stores resonated well, with the drama of a flight from religious persecution but by the third story, it badly lost its way.
Last story, set in 20th Century London, completely passed my by and the relevance of the entire work was lost on me.
Turned into a chore.
December 19, 2015
Li a edição portuguesa com o título "Um amor para a eternidade" publicada pelo Círculo de Leitores já há alguns anos atrás.
Um livro sobre destinos cruzados, amores perdidos no tempo e o destino.
Mistura contemporâneo com histórico, à medida que vamos acompanhando as vidas passadas das personagens até ao seu encontro final.
Aconselhado para quem gosta ou tem paciência para dramas.
Um livro sobre destinos cruzados, amores perdidos no tempo e o destino.
Mistura contemporâneo com histórico, à medida que vamos acompanhando as vidas passadas das personagens até ao seu encontro final.
Aconselhado para quem gosta ou tem paciência para dramas.
June 6, 2010
This novel relates four loves stories all connected to Portugal and the island of Madeira. The implication is that the same story is continued in four different eras through the persistance of the spirits and/or memories of the original couple.
February 11, 2012
A beautiful story about reincarnation across time, connections lost, remade, and re-remembered. Hauntingly beautiful.
Read
August 15, 2012Although I am not a love story lover, this book struck me as extraordinary. Its a beautiful tale of tragedy, love and struggle.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews