Authors: Katharine Weber
The Music Lesson
A
Publishers Weekly
Best Book of the Year
“Affecting and elegant.”
—
New York Times Book Review
“Wonderful … a super book that tells a dynamic and tightly controlled story, in prose sensual with the smell of things, the feel of things … genuinely surprising.”
—Kate Atkinson
“Like the Irish writer Brian Moore, whose work hers resembles, Weber constructs a spare, carefully plotted psychological thriller … Resonates long after the book is closed.”
—Houston Chronicle
“[An] emotionally involving thriller that is propelled by psychological intensity … Weber remains an author to be cherished, with the added, and quite rare, virtue of never writing a word too much.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“Tightly wrought, atmospheric thriller … Weber’s descriptive powers—whether depicting the elusive layers of character or the rocky, cloud-wrapped Irish countryside—are precise and evocative.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“[A] gem of a book.”
—Norfolk Virginian-Pilot
“A finely wrought and controlled piece of writing that explores the nature and danger of obsession.”
—
London Observer
“Artful … beautiful and at times menacingly obsessive.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“Beautifully wrought, accomplished, and engaging.”
—Irish Independent
“Taut, quick, and original: a good mix of real suspense with an intelligent story.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“A beautifully crafted, tightly controlled story … wonderfully sensuous descriptions of art and landscape.”
—Library Journal
(starred review)
ALSO BY KATHARINE WEBER
True Confections
Triangle
The Little Women
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Katharine Weber is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact the Random House Speakers Bureau at
[email protected]
.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998, 2011 by Katharine Weber
Questions for Discussion copyright © 2011 by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
BROADWAY PAPERBACKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1998, and in paperback in the United States by Picador, a division of MacMillan Publishers Ltd., New York, in 2000.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harcourt Brace & Company for permission to reprint excerpts from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” from
Illuminations
by Walter Benjamin, copyright © 1955 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a.M. English translation by Harry Zohn, copyright © 1968 and renewed 1996 by Harcourt Brace & Company. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weber, Katharine.
The music lesson / Katharine Weber.
p. cm.
1. Vermeer, Johannes, 1632-1675—Appreciation—Fiction.
2. Women art historians—United States—Fiction.
3. Irish Republican Army—Fiction. 4. Art thefts—Fiction. I. Title.
PS 3575.E2194 M87 2000
813’.54—dc21 99-54978
eISBN: 978-0-307-71807-5
v3.1
For my mother, who loves words
In a novel, the fictions are not necessarily limited to character and plot. The world has never seen this particular painting by Vermeer, because it does not quite exist. The Vermeer at Buckingham Palace is a different painting altogether, and I have no reason to believe that it has ever been the object of a ransom plot. While there was a recent Vermeer exhibition at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, it did not actually take place in the month of January. It would be very rude to write about my neighbors, so I haven’t. There is no village of Ballyroe in West Cork, but if there were, it might be near the village of Ardfield. I have no knowledge of any IRA splinter group calling itself the Irish Republican Liberation Organization.
K. W.
It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant
and that he did not know where the universe ended
.
JAMES JOYCE
,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
S
HE’S BEAUTIFUL
. Surely, there is nothing more interesting to look at in all the world, nothing, than the human face. Her gaze catches me, pins me down, pulls me in.
It’s dark and cold and wet. Why am I here and what am I doing? The entire muddy countryside—cows, sheep, pigs included—seems to be gripped by a seasonal despair in these short days. The shrill, thrilling wind blows into my bones and stays there. There are moments when I wonder if I will ever be warm again.
I look at my face in the mirror and it seems far away, indistinct, less real than hers.
I’m just back from a four-mile walk in the blowing rain to O’Mahoney’s, the nearest shop, where I bought some groceries and a newspaper, and this accounting ledger (the only notebook on his shelf), and had my first conversation of the day, with Mr. O’Mahoney, as follows, in its entirety: