The Music Lesson

The Music Lesson is an amazing exploration of the chasm that can exist between reality and perception. This tiny novel delivers about as much story as can be packed into 178 pages, in prose that is spare and beautiful. The Irish village setting is palpable, the theme timeless, the characters so well drawn you forget this is fiction. More than deserving of all the praise!

I really wanted to be enchanted by this one, but it was just okay. Vermeer's works are so magical to me. That's not to say there weren't moments of passion and beauty, but what shocked me is that the painting never came alive for me. The story starts out in Ireland, where Art Historian Patricia Dolan is babysitting a stolen painting. Told in flashbacks, the story unfolds to reveal the layers of Dolan's life: her own losses and regaining of passion, interwoven with her discovery of her Irish heritage. That it involves a cousin who is involved with an IRA splinter group, and an art heist breaks it out of the norm. Still, I wish I could have really felt the magic of Vermeer. That would have made it a full 5 stars for me.

"The Music Lesson" by Katharine Weber is a small, beautifully written novel. It is staged around a mad love affair between Patricia Dolan, an Art Reference Librarian in NYC, and an Irish cousin in need of her particular expertise.

I've just about hit my limit on depressing literary novels written by and/or about the Irish. My daughter has also recommended Colm Toibin and Colum McCann.

This novel tells the story of Patricia Dolan, a middle-aged art historian who finds herself in the midst of a mid-life crisis of epic proportions. The book opens with Dolan in the midst of a large-scale art heist, which removed a Vermeer from the clutches of none less than Buckingham Palace. Dolan is holed up in a cottage in a tiny, remote Irish Village with the stolen painting. How an American art history professor came to find herself in this situation comprises the first three-quarters of th book. The rest brings the heist to its dramatic and suspense-filled conclusion. At the outset of the book Patricia Dolan finds herself stalled in her career, divorced, and greiving the death of her daughter. She finds solace in a long-lost, show more decades youngr cousin who tumbles into her life and becomes the other half of Dolan's torrid love affair. It's the fling with this Irish cousin who launches Dolan into an Irish Liberation plot to steal a British-owned Vermeer. I found this book undeniably slow to get going. The details of Patricia's relationship with her cousin Mickey were not especially interesting. What was interesting was how an unassuming professor came to find herself in the midst of an international art heist. For as exciting as this book should have been, it simply was not. The characters were not especially well-developed, and were not always believable. The most interesting entity in this book is the painting, The Music Lesson. Perhaps this is intentional. The best-expressed emotion in this book is Patricia's love for the painting. The final, dramatic ending is the highlight of the book. Getting there, however, is slow going. show less

A quick read but now that I've come to the end, I've been left thinking about the plausibility of all of this happening. I enjoyed the pace of the novel and the gradual unfolding of the tale. This was more about Patricia Dolan and how she came to be where she was. Worth a read :)

[The Music Lesson] by [[Katherine Weber]] is a charming little novel about Patricia Dolan a middle-aged American of Irish descent who is staying in a cottage in West Cork for reasons which aren't apparent to begin with. As the story unfolds we learn more about Patricia and about the dangerous world she has gotten herself involved with.

A very quick read, less than 200 pages, this provides a convincing narrative of the theft of a Vemeer painting. Not fluff and not chick-lit (although I got kind of tired of her thinking about him all the time), it is simply a light read with good descriptions of Ireland - both the countryside and the inhabitants - plus a tiny bit of morals evaluation thrown in.

My only complaint with the book, and the reason it didn't rate higher, is that the writing style was attempting to mimic a journal kept following the theft. Although fairly representational of journal writing - bits of thoughts, tangents, random progress - there is a reason most people don't just publish their diaries "as is" - they are hard to read that way. The circuitous route show more she uses to progress the story gets a bit tiring at times, but the story does always (eventually) move forward. In addition, because I think the author truly wanted to stay true to the journal style, several of the characters she introduced remained somewhat 2 dimensional. There's no "omniscient" narrator giving the insights/thoughts of the other characters, so their development is limited only to the interactions the diarist pens herself.

Still an enjoyable read. show less