What do you think?
Rate this book
Fugitive
A beautiful work of the imagination, straddling history, memory, trauma and testimony
In 1917, a young composer writes a suite of twenty pieces for piano. Each pass by like a gust of wind. They are short, violent and strange - the music of another world. In 1938, a young Jewish family flees Italy for Sydney, Australia. In 1942, another family, this time Polish, is nearly destroyed.
Half a century later, a young man begins to understand the role the young composer's strange visions have played in everything that came before him and all that has come to be.
In his first book, Simon Tedeschi applies elements - from history, memory and the body of the musician - to make a remarkable work of imagination and fractal beauty. He straddles the borders of poetry and prose, fiction and fact, trauma and testimony. Fugitive is filled with what Russian poet Konstantin Balmont called 'the fickle play of rainbows'.
In 1917, a young composer writes a suite of twenty pieces for piano. Each pass by like a gust of wind. They are short, violent and strange - the music of another world. In 1938, a young Jewish family flees Italy for Sydney, Australia. In 1942, another family, this time Polish, is nearly destroyed.
Half a century later, a young man begins to understand the role the young composer's strange visions have played in everything that came before him and all that has come to be.
In his first book, Simon Tedeschi applies elements - from history, memory and the body of the musician - to make a remarkable work of imagination and fractal beauty. He straddles the borders of poetry and prose, fiction and fact, trauma and testimony. Fugitive is filled with what Russian poet Konstantin Balmont called 'the fickle play of rainbows'.
- GenresPoetry
10 pages, Paperback
Published May 3, 2022
1 person is currently reading
33 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 20, 2022
I wanted to love this book - it’s poetic, by a musician, displays his European reading and language, and structured in short paragraphs with infinity signs between, sometimes with sentences overrunning the sign. It uses music instructions to embellish meaning, and translates them. It should appeal to me. But I found it pretentious and privileged. I found a mistake on the first page (temperomandibular joint dysfunction is not abbreviated to TMJ - that only indicates the joint). I found the poetics meaningless. Does he really incite the cliche ‘if you love someone set them free’ in relation to butterflies? It feels like this classical celebrity gets published for writing poetry because of who they are. It needs more editing. Honestly it needs to be aware of the land in which it’s written as well as all the European adulation. And why not read and quote a woman for once. Heidegger Freud bla bla bla.
April 8, 2022
Simon Tedeschi is best known as a concert pianist and this, his first book, draws heavily on his life, music, and family history in almost meditative prose. Generational trauma and the influences of history on his family's Jewish and Russian past weave into recollections, philosophising, musings and literary connections. The writing flows like a musical piece between fast and slow, past and present.
Fugitive is only a short work (just under 100 pages) as many modern poetry works are and there were many times when I felt a greater understanding of music, especially classical music, on my part would have increased the depth of this reading experience. This book feels very personal for Tedeschi and occasionally this makes for uncomfortable reading - like reading someone's diary.
Recommended for readers who enjoy modern poetry, experimental forms, exploring interwoven generations, or music.
Fugitive is only a short work (just under 100 pages) as many modern poetry works are and there were many times when I felt a greater understanding of music, especially classical music, on my part would have increased the depth of this reading experience. This book feels very personal for Tedeschi and occasionally this makes for uncomfortable reading - like reading someone's diary.
Recommended for readers who enjoy modern poetry, experimental forms, exploring interwoven generations, or music.
June 23, 2022
Fugitive is a rare lyrical joy.
Though a glance inside its covers, with its narrow columns of fragmentary observations, broken by hand-drawn infinity symbols might frighten off a reader un-used to such conventions, it would be a loss to them to walk away without diving into this actually very accessible text.
The nonfiction narrative is formed via a perfectly controlled fluid stream of notes, ghosts and characters tracing synaptic flashes of observation, story, memory and myth. It sketches temporalities and continents, the subject matter moving deftly through dazzling segues that move from wryly funny to tragic and back again within the space of a breath. Only a certain kind of writer, within exactly this kind of form can write work that is so brilliantly and movingly performative and kinetic.
Tedeschi is a noted concert pianist, and much of Fugitive is drawn from the knowledge inherent in the writer's grasp, both what he has learned and what his body has intuitively gleaned from his work as a musician. The title is drawn from a rough translation of a Russian word – Mimolyotnosti – as (inexactly) 'fleeting', the word in its muteable senses of translation appears as a motif throughout the text. It is the imperfect nature of the work of translation that so informs this narrative, via languages but and the flow of people across time, circumstance and oceans.
I don't think you can write a review that encapsulates a work like this. It is more that you must describe the ways that it makes you feel, and your compulsion to take out a pencil, to underline, to write notes in the margins so that you might remember that in this way of writing, Tedeschi has made you remember something about the nature of grief and resilience, about love and humour that you haven't seen captured so beautifully before. Fugitive probes the breathtaking limits of our fragility, while simultaneously limning the ways in which we miraculously survive and know joy and sorrow, and everything in between.
It's also a joyful rumination on language, and the lyric form allows for a simulation of the processes of memory, the non-linearity of thought and recall. Writing in this way allows Tedesechi to cover so much of things that wouldn't otherwise have been allowed space or opportunity in a more traditional essay or memoir. To conclude, yes it's literary but it's an easy, pleasurable and quick read, or ride, and this is a book that one would never put aside once begun. You might also find that you want to go back and read it again the moment you have finished, such is its charm.
Though a glance inside its covers, with its narrow columns of fragmentary observations, broken by hand-drawn infinity symbols might frighten off a reader un-used to such conventions, it would be a loss to them to walk away without diving into this actually very accessible text.
The nonfiction narrative is formed via a perfectly controlled fluid stream of notes, ghosts and characters tracing synaptic flashes of observation, story, memory and myth. It sketches temporalities and continents, the subject matter moving deftly through dazzling segues that move from wryly funny to tragic and back again within the space of a breath. Only a certain kind of writer, within exactly this kind of form can write work that is so brilliantly and movingly performative and kinetic.
Tedeschi is a noted concert pianist, and much of Fugitive is drawn from the knowledge inherent in the writer's grasp, both what he has learned and what his body has intuitively gleaned from his work as a musician. The title is drawn from a rough translation of a Russian word – Mimolyotnosti – as (inexactly) 'fleeting', the word in its muteable senses of translation appears as a motif throughout the text. It is the imperfect nature of the work of translation that so informs this narrative, via languages but and the flow of people across time, circumstance and oceans.
I don't think you can write a review that encapsulates a work like this. It is more that you must describe the ways that it makes you feel, and your compulsion to take out a pencil, to underline, to write notes in the margins so that you might remember that in this way of writing, Tedeschi has made you remember something about the nature of grief and resilience, about love and humour that you haven't seen captured so beautifully before. Fugitive probes the breathtaking limits of our fragility, while simultaneously limning the ways in which we miraculously survive and know joy and sorrow, and everything in between.
It's also a joyful rumination on language, and the lyric form allows for a simulation of the processes of memory, the non-linearity of thought and recall. Writing in this way allows Tedesechi to cover so much of things that wouldn't otherwise have been allowed space or opportunity in a more traditional essay or memoir. To conclude, yes it's literary but it's an easy, pleasurable and quick read, or ride, and this is a book that one would never put aside once begun. You might also find that you want to go back and read it again the moment you have finished, such is its charm.
February 7, 2025
I've met Simon a few times (he's a great pianist), and so I could totally imagine this book representing his stream of consciousness. It's unclear whether this book is fiction or non-fiction (it feels mostly non-fiction), but it is probably most similar to poetry.
Written in short blocks of sentences separated by an infinity symbol, it follows a zig-zagging trajectory of inner thoughts from jaw pain to Simon's Jewish heritage via his grandparents through to a collection of short pieces by Prokofiev known as Visions Fugitives. It's not always clear exactly what the connection is (I did say it was poetic) but the feeling of the Russian pieces, Jewish suffering and perhaps the difficulties and mind games of being a concert pianist are very much to the present. I'm not sure how many people would get into this, but I found it interesting to understand better someone I mostly know through his piano playing (and the odd conversation about horror movies!).
Written in short blocks of sentences separated by an infinity symbol, it follows a zig-zagging trajectory of inner thoughts from jaw pain to Simon's Jewish heritage via his grandparents through to a collection of short pieces by Prokofiev known as Visions Fugitives. It's not always clear exactly what the connection is (I did say it was poetic) but the feeling of the Russian pieces, Jewish suffering and perhaps the difficulties and mind games of being a concert pianist are very much to the present. I'm not sure how many people would get into this, but I found it interesting to understand better someone I mostly know through his piano playing (and the odd conversation about horror movies!).
December 11, 2022
Reflections of being human, rumination on being a human. Lyrical sashays into identity and memory, curated through word associations and translations, playful & creative links to Old World trauma and musical meditations on ghosts and grandparents, borders, words and performing.
March 13, 2023
A fragmentary journey through the mind of concert pianist Tedeschi: mostly short paragraphs separated by infinity symbols. It's prose that gestures towards poetry and ranges widely across music, philosophy and other areas.
July 14, 2022
This spoke to me in so many different ways. Observations, feelings, words, places, time, art, music, reflections - it is a unique book by a truly gifted human being.
December 29, 2022
“Am I real or is the wind? Time to write a poem.”
July 1, 2024
An interesting whirling view of life and self, worth the read!
April 28, 2025
Charming, insightful, beautiful, witty. A hidden gem. While it may be lost on many members of this generation, it will assuredly be discovered by many more to come.
June 11, 2023
As a fellow musician-author, who has played in orchestras backing Tedeschi's prodigious performances of Rhapsody in Blue, I wanted to like and rate this higher. I'm not a pianist, and it took a revisit to realise that the frequent references to a Russian word Mimolyotnosti were a translation of the French Visions Fugitives, Opus 22 by Prokofiev. My reading would have been less frustrated if this had been clarified upfront.
The back cover blurb references a composer in 1917 (Prokofiev, one gathers); another family, this time Polish, nearly destroyed in 1942; and 50 years later, a young man (the author himself, one gathers) All unnamed, so the reader must try to make sense of obscurity and this reader was lost more often than not, especially in the earlier fragmented pages.
Tedeschi tracks back and forth in time, country, hemisphere. Later pages caught interest as the author pianist revealed more professional and personal insights such as "My piano teacher used to tell me to practise slowly, otherwise the piece would become damaged, and from this I understood that the piece was alive and I was hurting it."
Readers who enjoy Tedeschi's music inevitably will respond to insights into his performance art and here he displays skills as a wordsmith. "But if the note sounds just the way you like it (and you'll never know why)–if you manage to make a sound so quiet that it breaks through everything–then God is in the room."
Fellow musicians can relate to "If you've performed more times than you can count, one recital flows into another, there's no clear ending, the mask is grafted on."
"If my walk is right, I'll arrive on stage before the clapping's still fresh. But if I'm too quick, a ghost might slip in. Just before walking on, I'll crack a joke (a joke seals a crack, but only gets you through the next few breaths). Then I'll walk on, stare into the craggy blackness, see only a monster's machinist bowels, try to find a friendly face...Seconds away from playing, there's an invisible one between me and my audience that only I can see...What most people don't know is that every performance starts long before the performance starts. I need to keep my game face welded on or the wind might change, I might be caught in a howl."
Fugitive's structural pendulum swing to long unpunctuated pages did allow themes to emerge and develop; of ghosts, of masks. These bring some effective images but this book needed development and was saved by brevity.
The back cover blurb references a composer in 1917 (Prokofiev, one gathers); another family, this time Polish, nearly destroyed in 1942; and 50 years later, a young man (the author himself, one gathers) All unnamed, so the reader must try to make sense of obscurity and this reader was lost more often than not, especially in the earlier fragmented pages.
Tedeschi tracks back and forth in time, country, hemisphere. Later pages caught interest as the author pianist revealed more professional and personal insights such as "My piano teacher used to tell me to practise slowly, otherwise the piece would become damaged, and from this I understood that the piece was alive and I was hurting it."
Readers who enjoy Tedeschi's music inevitably will respond to insights into his performance art and here he displays skills as a wordsmith. "But if the note sounds just the way you like it (and you'll never know why)–if you manage to make a sound so quiet that it breaks through everything–then God is in the room."
Fellow musicians can relate to "If you've performed more times than you can count, one recital flows into another, there's no clear ending, the mask is grafted on."
"If my walk is right, I'll arrive on stage before the clapping's still fresh. But if I'm too quick, a ghost might slip in. Just before walking on, I'll crack a joke (a joke seals a crack, but only gets you through the next few breaths). Then I'll walk on, stare into the craggy blackness, see only a monster's machinist bowels, try to find a friendly face...Seconds away from playing, there's an invisible one between me and my audience that only I can see...What most people don't know is that every performance starts long before the performance starts. I need to keep my game face welded on or the wind might change, I might be caught in a howl."
Fugitive's structural pendulum swing to long unpunctuated pages did allow themes to emerge and develop; of ghosts, of masks. These bring some effective images but this book needed development and was saved by brevity.
January 21, 2026
The processes that lead us to read certain books are often strange. Having finished one book, I was shown other books I might like to read. I always skim over such recommendations very lightly and then move on. This time, I saw the name Simon Tedeschi and paused - wasn’t he the piano player who sometimes featured on Spicks and Specks, and maybe I had seen him playing live, so I decided to download the book, not really knowing what it was about …
My reasons for reading this book were thus somewhat tenuous, and as I read I often felt that my understanding, my ability to connect and grasp the meaning was equally tenuous. I’m a school teacher, and as I read I often felt like I was interacting with a student on the spectrum, or perhaps an obsessive compulsive. But whilst it was often an unsettling experience, aspects of it called to me - in many ways akin to reading poetry, and just like a poem, I feel like I could reread it dozens of times and always take away something different. Perhaps if I was at all musical I would have gained so much more, but even without this knowledge, this experience, I found Fugitive rich, confronting and thought provoking
My reasons for reading this book were thus somewhat tenuous, and as I read I often felt that my understanding, my ability to connect and grasp the meaning was equally tenuous. I’m a school teacher, and as I read I often felt like I was interacting with a student on the spectrum, or perhaps an obsessive compulsive. But whilst it was often an unsettling experience, aspects of it called to me - in many ways akin to reading poetry, and just like a poem, I feel like I could reread it dozens of times and always take away something different. Perhaps if I was at all musical I would have gained so much more, but even without this knowledge, this experience, I found Fugitive rich, confronting and thought provoking
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews