Edward Hopper, Hotel Room, 1931

ILLUMINATIONS
By Eva Hoffman,
Harvill Secker, £11

“Eva Hoffmann was born in Cracow, Poland, and emigrated in her teens to America.” So begins the uninformative back flap bio of the author of this beautifully written, but ultimately unsatisfying, novel. The brief paragraph goes on to mention the various awards she has received, and ends, “she currently lives in London”. In fact, Eva Hoffmann is a respected intellectual figure on both sides of the Atlantic. Her autobiography, Lost in Translation, talks about the decision of her parents (both Holocaust survivors) to emigrate to Canada, and deals with the dislocating, yet transforming, power of language in a new culture. Her second book, Shtetl, sought to recreate the Jewish life of a small Polish town, and raised uncomfortable questions about the extent of Polish anti-Semitism. Since then Hoffmann seems to have become the modern version of the ‘wandering Jew’ — from academic work in English literature and training in classical music at universities as far apart as Rice University in Texas to Harvard, to a peripatetic existence in Europe and the US.

Some of these resonances — the rootlessness, the love of classical music, and a determination to engage with the troubled history of the 20th century — find an echo in this, her second novel. Isabel Merton is a concert pianist, whose playing is marked by a complete surrender to the power of the music; it’s no accident that she adores Schubert and Chopin. The book opens with her at a moment of personal crisis. She has left her partner (or husband — this isn’t clear) and embarked on what seems to be a fairly exhausting programme of concerts all over Europe. She feels a disjunction between her inner life as a musician and the itinerant life she leads of flights, hotels and brief encounters. In sections throughout the book subtitled, “In Between”, the reader is invited to share her feelings; for instance, walking down the long corridors of Charles de Gaulle, she muses, “I’m as free as a bird and I skim against the surfaces of the world.”

The scene is set for a life-changing encounter, and at first it seems the stuff of a Victoria Holt-type romance. Isabel meets Anzor Islikhanov, a political exile from Chechnya, whose life is consumed by a passionate desire to avenge the wrongs done to his people, and who leads a similarly nomadic existence. True to form, he is a brooding Byronic figure. Their relationships develops across the various cities she finds herself in, and the reader is drawn into this awkward pas de deux. (A captious reader may wonder at this point about Anzor’s commitment to his cause, since he appears to turn up wherever Isabel is performing.) The unworldly Isabel first becomes aware of the violence of the real world in Amsterdam (although it is not clear whether Chechens are responsible) — and the leashed violence in Anzor — when a bomb blast at one of her concerts jolts her out of her obsession with him. Like a wounded animal she retires into her shell to emerge with “a gaze less inturned, directed at her surroundings with a different alertness.”

As the book progresses, we gradually get a sense of an unloving mother, a brother dying young of drug overdose, a youth spent in Argentina. There is a sense that she has locked herself away from life in her music. Isabel carries with her the diaries of her old music teacher, who had perceived the fire and passion with which she approaches her music, and whose observations form a sort of independent judgment on her. We are not told why Isabel is reading these diaries and what she hopes to learn from them. As for Anzor, he’s too much of a stock figure of the glamorous terrorist. Possibly the author wanted to get away from her usual preoccupations with Eastern Europe and the Holocaust, but Anzor fails to come alive on the page. This is a pity because the deportation of the Chechen people is one of the unsung tragedies of the last century. As for the other characters, they have walk-on parts.

The problem with this book is its failure to convince. Isabel seems to go through life like a somnambulist — she doesn’t possess a mobile phone, nor does she read the newspapers or watch television. She seems to be unaware of the internet, nor does she possess a laptop, a sine qua non of the modern musician. This sense of sleepwalking through life, is emphasized by the author’s decision to use the present tense throughout.

The best parts of the book are when the author tries to make the reader share the experience of playing and listening to music: as Isabel plays Chopin’s Second Scherzo, “She feels an uninhibited, almost wild joy as the piece opens out into its expansive melody emerging from her fingers with a fluent lyrical emotion.” Listening to her play, a member of the audience thinks, “the melody, weaving meandering, lyrical, ah, the sheer beauty/ Chopin, incomparable/ it’s in me, weaving through me, she’s poured it into me”, before veering off to think of the stock market figures.

Eva Hoffmann has erudition, a passion for music and a sense of history. She has the ability to convey delicate emotion and the wandering stream of thought. It is possible that she wants to move from her roots in the Jewish Holocaust to remind us of other horrors. Unfortunately, this book lacks the unsparing vision of her non-fiction, and comes off as a Gothic romance with intellectual trappings.