Authors: Katharine Weber
The Music Lesson (19 page)
3. This novel deals with the ideas of accomplices and couriers. In which way are we all accomplices, and why
do we become accomplices? In which way are we all couriers?
4. Discuss the idea that a representation can seem more beautiful than the real object.
5. What is the impact of the journal entries on the pace of the novel? What is the effect of the brevity of the novel? How does the spareness of the language control the flow and the tension of the novel?
6. Is Patricia’s life better before the story begins or after the story ends?
7. Do you believe, by the book’s end, that Mickey is really Patricia’s cousin? Do you believe that he had genuine feelings for her?
8. The age-old question applies here—do the ends justify the means in
The Music Lesson
?
9.
The Music Lesson
is a visual, tactile, sensory book. Music, color, texture, the natural world, the world of Dutch seventeenth century painting … these are all addressed in the book, though not always overtly. Is the author “painting” the world from which Patricia has withdrawn? Does Patricia regain this world by novel’s end?
10. Patricia Dolan makes a brief but significant appearance in
Triangle
, published seven years after
The Music Lesson
. If you have read
Triangle
, did Patricia’s presence in that story surprise you? Is her apparent way of life what you would have expected? What do the cats in both novels signify?
Johannes Vermeer
, edited by Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Yale University Press, 1995.
The Art of Describing: Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century
, by Svetlana Alpers, University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Art in the Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts
, by Edgar Munhall, Charles Ryskamp, et al., Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Companion Guide and History
, by Hillard T. Goldfarb, Yale University Press, 1995.
The IRA: A History
, by Tim Pat Coogan, Roberts Rinehart, 1994.
The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849
, by Cecil Woodham-Smith, Penguin USA, reissue 1995.
The Music Lesson
Cakes and Ale
, by W. Somerset Maugham, Viking Penguin, reissue 1993.
The Sea, The Sea
, by Iris Murdoch, Penguin Classics, reissue 2001.
The Book of Evidence
, by John Banville, Vintage, reissue 2001.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in
Illuminations
, by Walter Benjamin, Schocken Books, reissue 1969.
K
ATHARINE
W
EBER
is the author of the novels
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, The Little Women, Triangle
, and
True Confections
. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, the cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Columbia University.
“True Confections
is [Weber’s] most delectable novel yet, a book that interweaves a history of candy, chocolate in particular, with a sweeping story of America’s immigrants, race relations, and religion from before World War II to the present day.…
True Confections
has plenty to digest. The last line is delicious.”—D
IANA
W
AGMAN
,
Los Angeles Times
True Confections
A Novel
$14.00 paper (Canada: $16.00)
978-0-307-39587-0
“With vibrancy and a steady barrage of linguistic brio … Weber provides a blend of artistry and insight far beyond what we usually see in a first novel.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
A Novel
$13.00 paper (Canada: $15.00)
978-0-307-58794-7
Coming in Summer 2011
Available from Broadway Paperbacks wherever books are sold