(Hér fylgir bókmenntaritgerð sem ég skrifaði í ensku, e.t.v. smá spoiler. Þar eð skáletur fyrir tilvitnanir er ekki valmöguleiki hér hef ég þær klausur í staðinn í gæsalöppum. Ágætt væri ef stjórnandi gæti lagað það)


The Song of Names is a novel written by Norman Lebrecht and first published in 2002. Lebrecht is best known for being one of the most widely-read and most highly regarded commentators on music, culture and politics today. He has a weekly column in The London Evening Standard and has written several books about music and musicians, received with great acclaim. He has a radio show on BBC 3, called Lebrecht Live.
The Song Of Names is Lebrecht´s first novel. It won the 2002 Whitbread first novel award. He is writing two more.
The story mainly takes place in London at a turmoil point in the history of Britain, during the second world-war.
War-horrors, air raids and death become a fact of life which people have to face every day.
The story told in past and present times, both seen through the eyes of the narrator, Martin Simmonds, his present being in the middle of the gulf-war and his past in London from 1939-1951.
The author winds together the images of war, the Holocaust, the Jewish culture, heritage and suffering and a story of friendship gained and lost. Music is a dominant factor in the story, and with that, the power of musicians to elevate and enslave people around them.

In 1939, Martin is 9 years old, a lonely swottish only child of a Jewish middle-class family.
His father, Mortimer Simmonds, runs a music company, pours himself into and sacrifies himself for it, neglecting his wife and son.Martin is mostly left to himself. Then one day Dovidl and his father turn up on the doorstep and Martin´s life is changed forever.
Dovidl is a Polish Jew. He is the same age as Martin, a child prodigy violinist and refugee from Warsaw. His father needs to guarantee Dovidl´s safety and help him develop his talent, while he himself returns to Warsaw to tend to his wife, who is giving birth. But of course war is looming. Martin´s father understands the seriousness of the situation and takes Dovidl into their home as one of the family. He also recognizes his unpolished talent and offers him the best musical tuition available.
In the the twelve years to come, Martin and Dovidl grow inseparable as blood-brothers. The musical genius of Dovidl has a paramount effect on their relationship. Dovidl´s talent truely is unique, he plays like no other but he is also constantly reminded of it by everyone, so he feels that way himself. Dovidl appreciates Martin´s intuition and knowledge. Martin is sensible and practical but easily exploited by his manipulative friend. He becomes the right hand of Dovidl, a “communicator to the outside world” and is swept along in admiration of Dovidl´s character and his music. Dovidl makes Martin feel indispensable to him, and that feeling of mattering to someone, of brotherhood fills his heart but at the same time he becomes dependent on Dovidl. When Dovidl unexpectedly vanishes on the night of his international debut he leaves Martin devastated, a shadow of his former self. It is almost as if Martin´s soul has been torn apart. His father becomes bankrupt but mainly worries about Dovidl´s safety and blames himself for breaking the promise he gave Dovidl´s father. Martin´s mother develops a mental illness and dies in an asylum. They had high ambitions for Dovidl but also gave him everything, he was like a second son to them.

Martin never recovered after losing his best friend and is condemned to forty years of humdrum half- life without any knowledge of Dovidl´s fate, if he is alive or dead. Martin runs a spectre of the firm his father founded, which now seems to be a dying industry.
He hears an echo from the past in the most unlikely place imaginable when called to judge in a musical competition mainly of earsores and miserable urchins in a nameless town. There he hears a fifteen year old boy play the violin in a way he knows only one man can conjure, music that that makes time stand still and his heart stops.
“So when time stopped still on a boy’s fiddle in the banqueting hall of a nameless town hall on the night another war ended and the glasses clinked and shloshed, I was terrified by the awakening, by the need to take an inevitable next step. I knew I must follow the evidence of my ears, but I could not bear to discover where, after all these years, it might dangerously lead”.

Martin sets out to find Dovidl and reclaim his life.

When meeting Dovidl again, he learns that Dovidl has been living in hiding amongst Hassidim Jews and as one of them.
Dovidl tries to explain what made him disappear all those years ago and betray all who loved him and believed in him.
He had received news about his parents. They had been moved to the Treblinka. The uncertainty and fear for their lives, having to accept their death harrows and traumatizes him ever since, forcing him to bury his pain within him. He had doubts about his playing, feeling he would never live up to his reputation. He was made out to be the greatest violinist since Kreisler himself but did not feel that way. Pressure had begun to take its toll, and he was burdened by the confusion of it, the mere growing-up, and frightened of what lay ahead. At this very desperate time in his life he gets a chance for a verification of his parents’ fate by the Hassidim. There he finds a sort of sanctuary and relief, he feels he can relate to them, the strings of Jewish heritage, culture and shared history of suffering fascinate him and bind him to them . Among them he no longer feels unique and is relieved of the responsibility of being a star. The day he was to perform was the same day as the the day he was to mourn his family, according to Hassidic law. Such is Dovidl´s awe for the aura, wisdom and authority of the Rebbe that he agrees to stay. We also get a fascinating explanation of the book’s title.


But, to my mind, the music and the friendship play the most dominant role in Norman Lebrecht´s novel along with finding oneself.

One of the story´s most touching moment is, in my opinion, the honest confession Dovidl makes to Martin after they have met again: I loved you dearly at a desperate time in my life, wheither you choose to believe that or not.

Each man´s life is about finding oneself and his pursuit of peace in his soul. Or, as another rewiewer so brillantly put it: ”measures of success are illusory; true success is found in one's own personal happiness“ .

I think Martin himself sums it up rather well, when he is trying to reexamine and reestablish his life. He asks himself what would have happened if Dovidl hat never turned up on his doorstep that fateful day. If he could have risen and developed on his own merits and qualities, Dovidl having hindered that, making Martin forever dependent on him.

”Would I want to have missed the thrill of bonding, the intimacy of music in the making, the time-stopping, spine-chilling thrill that I shall take with me to the grave?
..

In the grey self-accounting of a recovering insomniac, I am obliged to admit that I would not have missed a minute of it. What Dovidl brought was the revelation of intensity. He showed me that passion can invade dull lives, that my place on earth need not be suburban-so long as it is lit by a star. Even the mundane can be elevated, overturned, by a spontaneous burst of music."

As evident from this review I was truly fascinated by this book. Lebrect´s storytelling is wonderful. His insight, knowledge and sensitivity about his subject keep the reader engaged from the first page to the last. It is all in one, touching, witty, often tragic but ultimatily beautiful. Reflective like life itself.


I recommend this book to everyone.