A Musical Offering

Luis Sagasti
Charco Press

‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,’ David Byrne once supposedly remarked. The provenance of the bon mot is much disputed but it has become the shorthand for the intractable difficulties of translating music into words.

In his latest novel, Luis Sagasti takes this challenge head on. Much like Fireflies, his other novel to be published in English, A Musical Offering is not driven by plot and character as much as an ineffable philosophy of connection. Disparate episodes are juxtaposed into a mosaic of moments where music and history have abutted in both subtle and more dramatic ways. It opens with the tale of Count Keyserling and his difficulties in falling asleep. He turns to the cantor of Leipzig, a certain Johann Sebastian Bach, to compose a cure for his insomnia. The harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg is charged with performing these lullabies to the Count and it is the Goldberg Variations, as they are now remembered, which provide the leitmotif of the novel.

The success of Bach’s lullaby, though, is as much to do with the pauses as it is to do with the music itself. The Count commands the gaps between the variations to be shorter, to allay the overstimulating expectation. Sagasti takes great relish in treading these permeable borders, whether between sound and silence or noise and melody. He has a canny eye for the niche anecdotes from the annals that unravel these dichotomies as well as sending readers down Wikipedia rabbit holes.

But like any piece of music, its success is dependent on all the melodic components. Sagasti’s careful contrapuntal construction weaves together an eclectic range of vignettes which transcend their parts, leaving an indelible emotional impact that defies rationalisation. This is not to suggest that this is an exercise in creating some untainted aesthetic sublimity. The novel does not shy away from the soundtrack to humanity’s darker moments, during World War II in particular, and chronicling when music offered salvation in seemingly hopeless conditions.

The novel plays host to an array of characters across the history of music from Beethoven to the Beatles but if there is a principal protagonist, it is Glenn Gould. It is Gould that performs that recurring melody of the Goldberg Variations, in his own peculiar and eccentric manner, reminding us how every recording and performance of a piece is a version, distinct and unrepeatable. By bringing this novel into English, Charco Press bring a whole new dimension to this truth: in literature, every translation of a work is a version. Fionn Petch’s delicate and graceful translation here is yet another iteration of an unrealisable purity but the plaintive melody of its attempt will reverberate in new ways with every reader.

—Calum Barnes