Piano Angel

Following the recurrence of a brain tumour, Mark Blum chooses to return to his native Glasgow to die, leaving behind in New York his architectural practice, and bewildered friends and family. The processes of illness oblige Mark to re-assess his life and to re-establish contact with his brother Daniel, a successful photographer.

A legacy of bitterness and jealousy in the brothers’ relationship stems from their friendship as teenagers with a young Hungarian refugee, Anci Goldman. Anci, now a widow, reads of Mark’s death in a newspaper, and finds her feelings of loss inseparable from her own past and history. As she embarks on a commission to illustrate the work of Hans Christian Anderson she revisits her childhood in post-Trianon Hungary, the precarious days of war, and the siege of Budapest in 1945.

As Daniel comes to terms with the aftermath, practical and political, of Mark’s death. Anci, encouraged by her sons, decides to contact him again after forty years of silence…

About Esther Woolfson

Esther Woolfson was born in Glasgow. She studied at Edinburgh and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has a degree in Chinese. Her short stories have been broadcast by the BBC and published in many collections. She has received two writers’ bursaries from the Scottish Arts Council. A non-fiction account of living with birds, Corvus, was published by Granta in August 2008.

Praise for Piano Angel

'... a brooding, intelligent work replete with ideas and gripping drama.' Catherine Taylor, The Guardian

'... in the way she structures the story, Woolfson alternately summons-up the weight of grief and and the awareness of impending death. It's a powerful and well-told novel which tackles one of the toughest subjects.' The Herald

An Interview with Esther Woolfson

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I think that writing is more than just the activity itself — it’s more a way of thinking, the way in which you frame thoughts and arrange things in your mind, so it’s something I’ve always done, even when not actually putting words on paper. I loved writing from the time I began writing ‘compositions’ at school but didn’t think of writing for publication until many years later, when I had a short story published in the first ‘New Writing Scotland’.

It’s difficult to pick out any particular books or authors which have been influential because everything one reads has a bearing on what one writes and I’ve read fairly eclectically for a long time. I do think that reading the absolute best of the genre in which one writes is the most important influence on writing. The processes of discernment, learning to differentiate between what is good and what is the best should, ideally, give the critical edge to the way you approach your own work.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Piano Angel in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?

Piano Angel grew from a short story I wrote some years ago which was well-received critically when it was published. Something about the characters and their situation wouldn’t allow me to let them go. They seemed to be there in my mind so that I kept thinking about them. When I began writing about them at greater length, I felt that I knew them very well. I found the research into their history — particularly that of the history of the Second World War in Hungary and the revolution of 1956 — particularly fascinating and indeed terrible. I was, I think, simply trying to tell a story, one which turned out to be about endurance and the nature of the human spirit.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

One of the difficult things, initially, is crossing that barrier between the imagination and the actuality, between brain and paper. To a large extent, it’s a matter of experience I think, learning to be easy with one’s own thoughts and mode of expression.

How and when do you write?

I begin work at half past eight or nine in the morning, and work with many coffee breaks until lunchtime. I have some time off, then return to work in the late afternoon and often in the evening too. I work in a room with books and music (which I listen to only when I’m beginning the day’s work, or when I’m flagging — otherwise, it can be a distraction) and resident rook (the latter is not a necessity for the writer, just a welcome presence and encouragement). I work on a computer, at a desk and did, stupidly, sit on a saggy dining chair until about a year ago when I was working very long hours and wondered why I had a sore back. I replaced it with a proper, very comfortable desk chair which is bliss. I like to wear certain things when I work: jeans, black tee-shirt, Converse All Star on my feet and a black shawl tied round my waist. I have no idea why — it just feels right.

I hate when I’m not writing — I have to have something I’m working on, otherwise I feel purposeless. Luckily, at the moment, I’ve got a lot to do and quite a few ideas.

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

By necessity, I’ve been reading a great deal about birds in the past while — I’ve become very interested, as a non-scientist, in the science of birds, evolution, ecology, biology, and I’m trying to learn more. I’m reading The Wisdom of Birds by Tim Birkhead — a fantastic book by an expert on one of my favourite subjects — magpies. It’s beautifully illustrated too — a really lovely book. I’m also reading The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel which is one of those wonderfully-written books one can read over a long period of reading and re-reading; The End of the Alphabet, a delightful book by the Canadian writer C.S. Richardson, and The Iambics of Newfoundland by Robert Finch.

I’m fortunate in working part-time in a bookshop which means that I know what has been and is being published, and have a chance to browse and read and buy — I have tottering piles of books waiting to be read. I was recently given Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks and Eva Hoffman’s Illuminations by a friend and I’m about to begin both of those.

An extract from Piano Angel

I take my coffee, sit in the armchair by the window. I’m still here, in this flat. I’m here only because I haven’t been able to think without panic and fear about handing it back. I don’t want to imagine the moment of locking the door for the last time. I’ll consider it all soon. People try to give me advice, truisms, that these things take time, that it’s only sensible to wait a little before deciding. Should I leave, I think of the angel and the piano and the company of small ghosts who will assemble in my wake to follow me.

A reviewer said once of an exhibition of mine that I’m a photographer of ghosts. I am, he said, the antithesis of the war photographer. I wait, he said, until there’s nothing there but ghosts. I’m still not sure if he meant it as a compliment.

In the last photograph I took of him, Mark has his hand raised to his eyes. He’s smiling in the sunshine. That day, at the last moment, he lifted his hand. It looks ordinary enough, that photograph, not the last one that would ever be taken of him. His hand blurs there, a flash of whiteness and it makes him look as if he’s gesturing, warding off the blow of light. I didn’t take any of him later, although the thought of an exhibition did occur to me. Portraits of an illness. He’d have said,

‘Oh fuck it, Dan, some people would try to make a cheap cent out of anything,’ and we’d have laughed, but I didn’t anyway.

There was never any real doubt, not from the beginning. Although we used the words of reassurance to one other that people use at these times, any hope we held was kept unspoken in the depth of our minds in spite of the fact that we both knew the tumour in his brain was one which would grow and keep on growing. From that first phone call two years ago in November, I knew. In that moment, I knew just as he did, and felt that evening the inescapable substance of it and of what we’d have to say to one another one day; the names we’d have to speak.

I have a sense of regaining the past in a way I can’t explain. Past becoming future, ordinary things illumined, lightning flashes from a fathomless sky, as well as the ones people readily call history. What I do know is that the dead don’t just go away. They open doors and whisper names. They loom from their place like sirens on their rocks, beckoning with long, long fingers. But now, I just think of him, of what he told me I must do. I think of the lamp which I haven’t got round to switching on yet, and of how he’d laugh at me for sitting here in near-darkness, his voice pinning me with practised accuracy.

‘Ah, a temporary flicker in a dark cosmos.’ His voice from across an ocean. At this time of day in New York we’d be out, impatient, seeking as he is, was, both of us ambling through the dusk crowds on Fifth Avenue as we loved to do, his hand extending towards my sleeve, gripping it with the perennial, winning excitement of his life.

’Look!’ he’s saying, indicating something or someone I can’t quite see, towards which I turn quickly, holding my breath, in the grip of his hand, and in his voice that urgency which tells me that this is a chance I might miss and if I do, I’ll have missed it forever.

‘Look!’ he’s saying, ‘Dan, quick, look!’