Vikram Seth's An Equal Music - A Review
An Equal Music is the only Vikram Seth book I have read (so far). It is always a daunting task to start reading a book of an author of Seth’s stature. As one starts to read – the book comes to life like the music it portrays. Can a book which is solely about classical music (of which I have absolutely zero knowledge) sustain for the length of a novel? It can and does as it flows through chapters describing the perfect music, the love the protagonist Michael is in search of and the fusion of love, music and the life of a struggling violinist and a quartet named Maggiore. Michael is a narcissist. For him it is perfect or nothing. A butcher’s son from Yorkshire (no, Lancashire), he has started on his journey with the violin with encouragement from an elderly neighbour and inputs from the public library of unlikely Manchester - to make a small place for himself in classical music. As he struggles on in London , he finds his lost love Julia – while his quartet makes some of the perfect mu...