![]() First edition | |
Author | Rose Tremain |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publisher | Chatto & Windus |
Publication date | May 19, 2016 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | |
Pages | 241 |
ISBN | 978-1-7847-40030 |
The Gustav Sonata is a novel by English author Rose Tremain published in 2016 by Chatto & Windus.
It won the National Jewish Book Award in 2016 [1] and the Ribalow Prize in 2017 [2] and it was also shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards [3] and the Walter Scott Prize [4] in 2016 and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2017. [5]
It was loosely based on Paul Grüninger, Police Chief of the Canton of St Gallen in 1937. [6]
The novel is split into three parts:
Set in post-war Switzerland where Gustav Perle and his best friend Anton Zwiebel live in a fictional small town called Matzlingan. Gustav's father died mysteriously during the war, Anton is Jewish and plays the piano, but he comes last in a competition in Bern where his family and Gustav are in the audience. Gustav then joins the Zwiebels on a holiday to Davos where the boys play in an abandoned TB hospital...
Before the war, Gustav's mother Emilia attends the local Schwingfest wrestling festival where she falls for Erich Perle, the Assistant Police Chief in Matzlingan. She gets pregnant and they marry, but the pressure of the Jews migrating across the Austrian-Swiss border make her husband's job difficult, and he pushes her and they lose the baby. Erich arranges a holiday to Davos, to rebuild their relationship. Erich then starts falsifying entry dates to allow Jews to enter Switzerland, he therefore loses his job and his apartment as a result and, Emilie moves to live with her mother. Erich has an affair with Lottie, the wife of the Police Chief. Then Emilie returns and they have a child, Gustav. Erich then suddenly dies of a heart attack on the way to meet Lottie.
Gustav now runs a hotel in Matzingan, and resolves to find out about his father and he contacts Lottie who tells him about her lover Erich, and as the Hotel requires updating he accompanies Lottie to Paris. Meanwhile Anton is now a Music Director at an academy, where his playing of Beethoven sonatas bring him the attention of music impresario Hans Hirsch who takes Anton to Geneva to record them. Anton and Hans become lovers but Anton then has a breakdown. Gustav and Anton then move to Davos....
Emil Erich Kästner was a German writer, poet, screenwriter and satirist, known primarily for his humorous, socially astute poems and for children's books including Emil and the Detectives and Lisa and Lottie. He received the international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1960 for his autobiography Als ich ein kleiner Junge war. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in six separate years.
Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction. Michaels was the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 2016 to 2019, and she is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces, which was adapted for the screen in 2007. Michaels won the 2024 Giller Prize for her novel Held.
Schindler's Ark is a historical fiction published in 1982 by the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. It is based on the fictionalized story of the historical figure, Oskar Schindler. The United States edition of the book was titled Schindler's List; it was later reissued in Commonwealth countries under that name as well. The novel won the Booker Prize, a literary award conferred each year for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language, and was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction in 1983.
Dame Rose Tremain is an English novelist, short story writer, and former Chancellor of the University of East Anglia.
Gwethalyn Graham was a Canadian writer and activist, whose 1944 novel Earth and High Heaven was the first Canadian book to reach number one on the New York Times Best Seller list. Graham won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction twice, for her first novel Swiss Sonata in 1938, and for Earth and High Heaven in 1944.
Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.
Everything Is Illuminated is the first novel by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2002. It was adapted into a film of the same name starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hütz in 2005.
Henry Roth was an American novelist and short story writer who found success later in life after his 1934 novel Call It Sleep was reissued in paperback in 1964.
Anne Landsman is a novelist. She was born in Worcester, South Africa, the daughter of a country doctor, and is a graduate of the University of Cape Town and Columbia University. Until 2001, she lectured at The New School university in New York, where she still lives with her husband, architect James Wagman, and children.
Howard Eric Jacobson is a British novelist and journalist. He writes comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters. He is a Man Booker Prize winner.
Linda Grant is an English novelist and journalist.
Naomi Alderman is an English novelist, game writer, and television executive producer. She is best known for her speculative science fiction novel The Power, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017 and has been adapted into a television series for Amazon Studios.
Tamar Yellin is an English author and teacher who lives in Yorkshire. Her first novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher, won the 2007 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
Dara Horn is an American novelist, essayist, and professor of literature. She has written five novels and in 2021, released a nonfiction essay collection titled People Love Dead Jews, which was a finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in nonfiction. She won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award in 2002, the National Jewish Book Award in 2003, 2006, and 2021, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize in 2007.
Luize Valente, born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, of Portuguese and German origins, is a writer and documentary filmmaker, author of historical novels and awarded documentaries, and a journalist.
Francesca Segal is a British author and journalist. She is best known for her debut novel, The Innocents (2012), which won several book awards.
Richard Paul Teleky is a Canadian writer and academic, currently a professor in the Humanities Department at York University in Toronto, Ontario. His primary research areas include Central European literature, ethnic studies/immigrant literature, early modernist writing, and film and contemporary culture, as well as the creative process.
Disobedience is the debut novel by British author Naomi Alderman. First published in the UK in March 2006, the novel has since been translated into ten languages. Disobedience follows a rabbi's bisexual daughter as she returns from New York to her Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon, London. Although the subject matter was considered somewhat controversial, the novel was well received and earned Alderman the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers and the 2007 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.
The Ribalow Prize is a literary prize awarded annually by Hadassah Magazine the best work of fiction in English on a Jewish theme.
Harold U. Ribalow was an American writer, editor, and anthologist.