Katharine Weber - The Music Lesson: A Novel

ALSO BY KATHARINE WEBER

True Confections
Triangle
The Little Women
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

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.

Katharine Weber, on the Origins of The Music Lesson

Ive had in mind a story about a woman alone in a remote Irish cottage with a stolen painting since I first traveled to Ireland in 1976, on my honeymoon. In the tiny fishing village where we spent two rainy weeks, there was still much talk about the discovery and arrest, two years before, of the Anglo-Irish woman who had rented a local cottage in order to hide a cache of paintings stolen for ransom by the IRA from the Beit Collection in County Wicklow (a theft that made the Guinness Book of World Records for record value of stolen artworks at that time).

Among those paintings was a Vermeer. I remember tramping down a muddy lane in order to peer into the windows of what locals still called the picture cottage. At the time, I was intrigued by the notion of this woman in solitude at the edge of the sea with some of the great paintings of the world. Did she ever look at them? I wondered. What did they mean to her? The facts of the actual case have never been of enormous significance to me. Over the next twenty years, what stayed with me were those questions. In 1986, my husband and I bought a little house in that village, just across the little boreen that leads to the picture cottage, which I can see from my window. We spent time there every summer with our two children when they were growing up, and I also spend time alone in Ireland. It is there that I have done some of my most concentrated writing, and it is there that I began to write The Music Lesson.

About This Book

Patricia Dolan is alone with a stolen Vermeer painting in an Irish cottage by the sea. How she got here is part of the story she tells: about her father, a Boston cop; the numbing loss of her daughter; and her charming Irish cousin, who has led her to this high-stakes crime.

Questions for Discussion

1. Katharine Webers first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, considered appearance and reality, perception and perceptivity. How are those issues manifest in The Music Lesson?

2. There are many small and hidden spaces in this novelfake compartments, hidden cupboards. What do they signify? There are also many characters who arent what they seem. Can you recognize all the characters whose identities shift in the course of the story?

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 Patricias life better before the story begins or after the story ends?

7. Do you believe, by the books end, that Mickey is really Patricias cousin? Do you believe that he had genuine feelings for her?

8. The age-old question applies heredo 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 novels 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 Patricias 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, 18451849, by Cecil Woodham-Smith, Penguin USA, reissue 1995.

Books to Which Patricia Dolan Refers in 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.

True Confections is [Webers] most delectable novel yet, a book that interweaves a history of candy, chocolate in particular, with a sweeping story of Americas 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

S HES 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.

Its dark and cold and wet. Why am I here and what am I doing? The entire muddy countrysidecows, sheep, pigs includedseems 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.