The Lost Musicians

The lost musicians was apparently mostly written during the Second World War, when the Faroes were effectively a self-governing British protectorate, cut off from German-occupied Denmark, and many Faroese lost their lives serving in the Royal Navy or supplying Britain with fish. But it's set during the more cheerful times of Heinesen's childhood before the First World War.

A little group of unconventional characters get together regularly in a basement in a dodgy neighbourhood of Tórshavn to play string quartets, sing, discuss poetry, and have a few drinks (or a lot of drinks) with their friends. Most of them are relatively impoverished and live from crisis to crisis by doing various odd jobs - one is a ferryman, another sets type on show more the newspaper, another teaches and hangs wallpaper, etc. - but they are united by their belief that the things that matter most in life are friendship, love, and aesthetic pleasure, in particular expressed through music.

Set against them is the bank-manager Ankersen, a former drunkard himself, who has accepted Jesus into his life and is driven to share the Good News and sweep away the sinfulness he sees all around him. He founds - and then disagrees with and splits off from - his own nonconformist sect, and with the best possible intentions, he becomes directly or indirectly responsible for smashing up the lives of the musicians and their friends.

This is a theme for a novel that you can easily imagine Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Gottfried Keller, or Sinclair Lewis tackling, in their different ways - Heinesen is a bit different, though, because for him the emphasis is always on the sheer fun his characters are having, and even what would for anyone else be the most tragic moments entirely fail to take themselves seriously. The movement of the plot is left to take care of itself and the focus is always on incident. There is no political agenda, only a human one - Heinesen presumably wants us to see the danger of good intentions that fail to take account of the individuals they are dealing with, but his main point seems to be that the joy of music and poetry is something that ultimately triumphs, even in the worst situations: definitely something that needed to be said in the 1940s. show less

Heinesen’s characters are always vivid and well-sketched people. They are also always…quirky. To say the least. This book tells the story of a family of brothers in the Faroe Islands in the early 20th century. Although the primary focus lies in a battle for prohibition (of all alcohol) led by a somewhat cliched joyless, thoughtless, religious fanatic, the other story lines and tangents shine. I found the book was best not in its depiction of particular characters but rather in portraying the entire large cast of characters and their interrelationships.

I read this disjointedly with other books thrown in, in the middle, just because I work at a public library--not a boring book at all. Think of it as a novel that follows a community in a Scandinavian seaside village through a generation. That is, people that were young children at the beginning become middle-aged or die or disappear by the end. Much goes on in the plot, but as if it were a random sequence of personality traits and causalities, not one or two plot events predeterminedly thrown in. Temperance (booze) is one major plot thread; so is the fact that amateur musicianship plays a major role in the tone of the book, and in the structure of the parts. Struck a real chord with me.