Anna Enquist

Physician Bouw is on his way to meet his ex-wife Wanda, a classical pianist who has had to retire from performing due to rheumatoid arthritis and is now living in the Pyrenees. In the meantime we hear about Wanda’s childhood during the German occupation, her Jewish piano teacher Max de Leon, and her younger brother Frank, who has severe learning difficulties. But mostly about how it feels to grow up with an absolute conviction that the one thing you need to do in life is make music, and show more how that can affect your ability to deal with human relationships.
There is obviously a large autobiographical element in all this, Enquist is writing with both her pianist’s and her psychologist’s hat on, and the ostensible plot — even the “secret” promised by the title — seems a lot less important than her detailed investigation of the path along which someone becomes a serious musical performer, which is often quite merciless and utterly fascinating show less

A dark little story about a middle-class couple living a comfortable life in a coastal town in North Holland, but with a catastrophic gap in their lives where their nineteen-year-old daughter ought to be. Loes is a classics teacher, focussing on the order and structure of Tacitus when she isn't trying to impose order on her sandy garden; her husband Nico is the kind of psychiatrist who believes that the job of his profession is to re-equip people with acute mental illness for ordinary life show more in the community as quickly and efficiently as possible, and is keen to sweep all the psychoanalysts and long-term clients out of his hospital.

Naturally, poetic justice takes a hand, and he realises that he and Loes are like the ice-carriers they heard about on a holiday in France twenty years ago, men who used to bring slowly melting loads of fresh ice down on their backs from Pyrenean glaciers to the towns.

It's difficult to read this without remembering that Enquist is a psychoanalyst in her day job, and that she must have written this around the time that she lost her own grown-up daughter in a road accident. There's a lot of very dark anger here, and not much daylight glimmering through. But the "office politics" of the psychiatric hospital comes over very convincingly. show less

Forty-year-old composer Alice Augustus is in the middle of fertility treatment when she gets the commission to write a full-scale piece for the centenary celebrations of a major orchestra. As she searches for inspiration for the piece, she looks back on her life and reflects on her situation as a woman creative artist and the curiously indirect connections between artistic creativity and biological fertility.

In other hands this could have been a fairly banal sort of "I'm pregnant with a new show more piece of music" story, but of course Enquist treats it with rather more subtlety than that. She fills the background with real practical knowledge of musical life and, indirectly, presumably also her experience as a writer of fiction. She also talks about the tricky situation of contemporary "classical" music (we all agree that music would die without new compositions, but most of us would rather not listen to them...); Alice in reality earns her living writing 20-second tunes for advertisements under a pen-name, but no-one in the respectable world of the Conservatorium is supposed to know that.

There's a running parallel story of Enquist's real idol, Joseph Haydn, with his very fulfilled musical life and his many unhappinesses outside that, and there's also the image that gives Alice the inspiration for her piece, the demolition of the Rotterdam building that was decorated with Co Westerik's iconic 17-metre-high relief sculpture "Girl with skipping rope" (see the cover art) — Alice clearly identifies Westerik's girl with her own longed-for child and wonders about the eventual destruction that is inherent in artistic creation. (There's a project to recreate the sculpture on the wall of the Rotterdam Eye Hospital, but it's all gone very quiet since it was announced in July 2019: the wall was still blank last time I looked.)

A complicated and rewarding novel. show less

In a nameless City that — as usual in Enquist — looks, sounds and smells very like Amsterdam, the friends Hugo (1st violin; director of a doomed performing-arts centre), Jochem (viola; violin-builder), Carolien (cello; GP and Jochem's wife) and Heleen (2nd violin; nurse in Carolien's practice), meet most Fridays on Hugo's houseboat to play string quartets together. Carolien also still goes regularly for lessons with her old cello teacher, Reinier, now in his eighties and very frail.

They show more all have major problems in their personal lives, which they don't quite like to ask for help with. And they all find the work they are doing less and less valued in the new order of things around them. Healthcare isn't what it used to be, no-one even dares ask what the situation is like with care for the elderly, the City and the government have made it clear that funding classical music is very low on their list of priorities, and there's a major corruption scandal coming to trial in the City, always provided the glittering new court building doesn't fall down first.

The only thing that keeps them moderately sane and functioning is to spend a couple of hours immersing themselves in Dvořák, Mozart or Schubert, and occasionally sharing that pleasure with a few friends who are prepared to listen to them. Needless to say, Fate isn't too happy about this cultural escapism, and has a nasty surprise in store for them.

This should be a very depressing book: on the surface, Enquist clearly means us to see that the only reasonable response to the modern world is thoroughgoing pessimism. But it rather oddly isn't. Admittedly, the power of music can't solve the world's problems, nor can it provide us with a proper answer for our own private sorrows and fears, but somehow the assertion of its power to alleviate these things at least temporarily leaves us with a little glimmer of hope. show less