When he is hired as the personal piano tuner for a brilliant pianist, Brodie Moncur suddenly finds himself swept up into a life of luxury that he could never have imagined. But while accompanying his new employer on tours from Paris to St. Petersburg, Brodie falls madly in love with the Russian soprano Lika Blum: beautiful, worldly, seductive—and forbidden. Though seemingly doomed from the start, … start, Brodie’s passion for Lika only grows as their lives become increasingly more intertwined, more secretive, and, finally, more dangerous. A tale of dizzying passion and brutal revenge; of artistic endeavor and the illusions it can create; of the possibilities that life offers and the cruel speed with which they can be snatched away, Love Is Blind is a dazzling work of historical fiction that unfolds across fin de siècle Europe.
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I do like a good William Boyd novel and his latest doesn’t disappoint. From the title alone you know that not everything will go smoothly in this love story. Despite Brodie Moncur’s delusional paranoia over Lika Blum, the woman he falls in love with, he is a likeable character and I found myself rooting for him right to the end.
Love is Blind
by William Boyd
Meet Brodie Moncur, a peripatetic Scotsman looking for love all over Europe. This is definitely not your typical romance novel, and Brodie is not your typical romantic hero. Far from it! But I recommend this literary novel that will keep you turning the pages until the last one.
Brodie is a plain and unassuming young man who we learn early on has a father whom he hates—a mean, verbally abusive minister—and siblings who still live at home, unable apparently to escape his dehumanizing control.
Brodie has just one gift to offer the world—perfect pitch. He is, self-admittedly, the world’s best piano turner. So Brodie has escaped his father and works for a piano manufacturer in Edinburgh, Scotland. When the company owner promotes him to be the number two man at the newly opened Paris branch of the piano factory, Brodie is happy to leave his father and Edinburgh behind for a new life.
Convincing the Paris branch manager, the owner’s less than honest son, that the way to sell more pianos is to commission world-class concert pianists to play their brand of piano. Naturally, Brodie is needed to accompany these virtuosos on their European tours to keep the keyboards in tune.
He meets and immediately falls in love with a beautiful, young, struggling Russian opera singer who is the protégé of the pianist Brodie is traveling with. Their love affair starts slowly, but soon is the central element of the novel. But there are problems. Big problems for Brodie, not the least of which is the intense dislike members of the virtuoso’s family have for him, and the fact he contracts a serious disease.
This is not a novel with a strong arc for the protagonist and a satisfying resolution at the end like most contemporary novels, but in the hands of William Boyd, it is a compelling study of the life of an unusual character who is victim of his own deep love for a woman no matter where it leads. Boyd is an English author, the winner of numerous literary prizes. He is a master storyteller, and you should sample his work.
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I’ve always had something about William Boyd. He is only four years older than me and we were both born in Africa. Both went to a British boarding school. I became a Boyd fan in my 20s (when he was in his early 30s) with A Good Man in Africa and An Ice-Cream War. At the time I thought Boyd was still influenced a lot by older examples like Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, which is perfectly all right if you can pull it off as brilliantly as he did.
Then, starting with The New Confessions, Boyd clearly became his own man as a writer, and has remained that ever since. Never wrote a bad book in a very long career.
“Love is Blind” only confirms that Boyd is still a master at his craft. This novel is complex, profound and subtle, and the story is so compelling that you just keep reading. What’s not to like?