PIANO ANGEL
Esther Woolfson
Nominated for the 2010 IMPAC Award; shortlisted for the Saltire Society Homecoming Award 2009
Click here for Esther's author page.
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
'This is an emotional, wide-ranging book about facing death, caring for someone who is terminally ill, looking at the past from a different perspective, immigration, familial ties and memories. Esther Woolfson handles the complexities of her novel with assurance and excellent writing, handling a plot which could have become depressing with consummate skill and turning it into an uplifting, positive read.' Press & Journal
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!’
We are grateful to the Scottish Arts Council for a grant towards the publication of Piano Angel.
