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| Rating: 4.5/5 |
I recently won The Metropolis Case on a Goodreads Giveaway (another reason I love Goodreads.com!), and as usual, was a little skeptical. Goodreads has book giveaways that range from renown authors like Louis Erdrich to self-published vampire romance novels that look, well, terrible. You never quite know what you're going to get, but sign up for the ones that sound good anyways. It's free after all. In regards to The Metropolis Case, I was pleasantly surprised.
This book is gorgeous, inside and out. And I can't think of a book whose cover better reflects its contents, poetically and aesthetically, than this one. This is Matthew Gallaway's debut novel, and it's a story of 4 people, intertwined by a love for music, opera specifically. It came as a shock to me when reading Gallaway's bio that he was never a singer based on the way he so beautifully describes opera in sound and experience.
The book revolves around Lucien, a young singer in 19th century France; Anna, a rising opera star in 1960s America; Maria, born with "four lungs", a young singer, though an outcast, in 1970s Pittsburgh; and Martin, an HIV+ lawyer in 9/11 era New York who is transformed by watching the towers fall from his office on that fateful September day. In the beginning of the novel, it's hard to determine how these characters are related, other than a recurring theme of the Wagner opera, Tristan and Isolde. But Gallaway does weave these stories together in elegant fits and starts until the entire connection is revealed in the last pages of the novel.
The real stars of this novel, however, are the prose. As written in the NYT's review (so conveniently included with my copy), there is "never a lazy sentence". I can't imagine the energy it took to write such gorgeous descriptions, and yet, the book flew by. A quick read. My favorite passages were those used to describe music, production or one's response to music, such as this description of Maria, now an up-and-coming opera singer, making her debut in a Bayreuth production of T&I with the renowned singer, Leo Metropolis.
"She spent a few seconds analyzing his voice, the way it seemed to weave through the house, around the columns, and under and over the wooden back seats....They shared the love potion, which poured down her throat like hot poison, and then became an open wound of desire that grew more infected with each passing second. When the act ended, the was ripped from Leo's arms, it was an apocalypse: writhing she had to be passed to her dressing room like a bucket of water by a line of production assistants and there propped onto a couch and spoon-fed sips of tea to keep her throat moist."
An amazing first novel. Highly recommended.
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