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A Novel
by Janice Galloway
With "humanism, generosity, and a passionate, beating heart" (The Times, London), Janice Galloway's Clara reignites, from between the lines of history, the great love of Robert and Clara Schumann.
In her lifetime, Clara was a celebrated concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms — as well as mother of the eight Schumann children and caretaker of her husband through a series of crippling mental illnesses. In its luminous integrity the novel brings Clara Schumann to life as a woman of genius. Galloway is at once a meticulous researcher of her subjects' remarkable and highly dramatic artistic careers and a virtuoso storyteller whose imagination and empathy lead her to that place off limits to history and biography — inside the human mind. Distilling the memories, poetry, and musical notes therein, she examines the ways artists divine patterns out of life's chaos. "Passion," writes Galloway of Clara's performance philosophy, "one might take for granted — its control is the mechanism through which all else flows." Though music may have bent to Clara's will, love served her far more tragically. Dismissing the clichés of Great Art and rejecting the romantic conflation of Madness and Creativity, Clara boldly ventures that in a life marred by alienation and isolation, "Work alone endures."
"The musical background is equally rich. Musical giants walked the earth in the Schumanns' 19th-century Germany, and Mendelssohn, Brahms, Liszt and Chopin make a compelling chorus in this operatic drama." —Publishers Weekly
"Galloway's intense yet subtle depiction of Clara Wieck-Schumann's life is a novel to be savored at a leisurely pace in order to truly enjoy the depth of this author's richly stylized writing." —Booklist
This information about Clara was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Janice Galloway's books include the novels The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, which won the 1990 MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year Award, and Foreign Parts, which won the 1994 McVitie's Prize. In 1994 she also won the E. M. Forster Award, presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Glasgow.
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