The Gustav Sonata
ROSE TREMAIN

This is Rose Tremain’s fortieth year as a published author, and she is marking it with a perceptive and beautifully realised novel of unrequited and misplaced love. It’s set in Switzerland, beginning just after the end of the Second World War, when Gustav is a small boy. He lives with his widowed, struggling mother in a joyless and practically toyless existence, loving but not particularly loved, and taught the virtues of self-control from the egg. At six he meets Anton, who lacks any hint of the shell which Gustav is being encouraged to grow; Anton is musical, hypersensitive, Jewish and well-off, and the two boys, so different, become very close. It is Gustav, however – enduring and self-sufficient through necessity – who is vulnerable to the piercing hurt of Anton’s single-minded myopia. Anton has been focused from the beginning on achieving success as a concert pianist, and empathy for others’ lives never impinges on that narrow focus.