Love is Blind

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Complicating matters is Brodie’s tuberculosis, a constant threat that dials up the book’s tension and, along with an old-fashioned duel in St. Boyd brilliantly brings the whole thing to life with his rich descriptions of time and place and razor sharp dialogue.

Der Tranensee, The Lake of Tears : That song had been the catalyst of all the happiness in his life, he thought. When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. It all gets a bit technical and drawn out here in my opinion but you can’t help but realise that the art of piano tuning is a fascinating one! I liked how Boyd used the piano tuning business as platform to enable Brodie to launch his career, assist key musicians, find love and travel the world. Interestingly, I find myself in the somewhat unusual position of loving a book more than many others on GR.I can't believe Boyd wasn't even nominated for the 2018 bad sex in fiction award (which gives me some idea of how REALLY bad the others were). When, on the promenade at Nice, he meets a tall Russian doctor with a pointy beard who is suffering from tuberculosis, he has no idea who he is. But there’s no philosophical armature to Love Is Blind, only the most convoluted of bildungsromans . Love Is Blind eventually reminded me of a tired revival of one of Franco Zeffirelli’s decades-old, hyper-naturalistic stagings for the Metropolitan Opera: all surface detail, no life. But life without Lika isn't really life, and Brodie is still young and impetuous, and more than a little naive.

The novel is set in the late 19th and early 20th century, focusing on Brodie Moncur, a Scottish piano tuner. Boyd’s books have included more serious (and more funny) efforts — like “ Any Human Heart” (2003), a vigorous account of a 20th-century life, and the richly nuanced, darkly comic “ An Ice-Cream War” (1983) — as well as slighter, larkier ones like this. I played a simple martingale system: doubling my stake (2 fr) when I lost and pocketing my winnings when I won. Brodie falls hopelessly in love with Kilbarron's Russian mistress, Lika Blum, an aspiring opera soprano, and becomes a man obsessed.This is the first in a chain of many travels that will see Brodie living in Nice, Biarritz, Geneva, Trieste, an estate in Russia and even the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean! He takes us to the gloomy Scottish countryside and the Mediterranean shores of Nice, enveloping the reader in a time in European history when horses are being replaced by cars, women still have few choices, and men can settle their feuds without the interference of law.

In the past he’s given us, for example, the fictive autobiography of John James Todd in The New Confessions; the fake journal of Logan Mountstuart in Any Human Heart; and the invented life of the artist Nat Tate, in the hoax biography of the same name.And then he did feel a moment's sadness: thinking of his brothers and sisters and their circumscribed conditions. In the TLS's recent Booker 50th anniversary edition, various past winners were asked about underrated authors that should have featured more in the prize's reckoning.