The Music Lesson

by Katharine Weber

Hardcover, 1998

Call number

FIC WEB

Collection

Publication

Crown (1998), Edition: 1st, 192 pages

Description

"She's beautiful," writes Irish-American art historian Patricia Dolan in the first of the journal entries that form The Music Lesson. "I look at my face in the mirror and it seems far away, less real than hers." The woman she describes is the subject of the stolen Vermeer of the novel's title. Patricia is alone with this exquisite painting in a remote Irish cottage by the sea. How she arrived in such an unlikely circumstance is one part of the story Patricia tells us: about her father, a policeman who raised her to believe deeply in the cause of a united Ireland; the art history career that has sustained her since the numbing loss of her daughter; and the arrival of Mickey O'Driscoll, her dangerously charming, young Irish cousin, which has led to her involvement in this high-stakes crime. How her sublime vigil becomes a tale of loss, regret, and transformation is the rest of her story. The silent woman in the priceless painting becomes, for Patricia, a tabula rasa, a presence that at different moments seems to judge, to approve, or to offer wisdom. As Patricia immerses herself in the turbulent passions of her Irish heritage and ponders her aesthetic fidelity to the serene and understated pleasures of Dutch art, she discovers, in her silent communion, a growing awareness of all that has been hidden beneath the surface of her own life. And she discovers that she possesses the knowledge of what she must do to preserve the things she values most. "From the Hardcover edition.""… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member wyvernfriend
interesting story about an art theft, seduction and betrayal. Very readable and well worth a go. Occasionally the Irish characters seemed a bit stage Irish but overall not a bad book. I found it difficult to pinpoint the actual time for a while until the characters started to talk about specific
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events in the past. Then again I'm sure there are places in the wilds of Cork that are like that.
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LibraryThing member beata
What happens when another picture by Vermeer van Delft gets stolen. This time in modern Ireland.
LibraryThing member pbadeer
A very quick read, less than 200 pages, this provides a convincing narrative of the theft of a Vemeer painting. Not fluff and not chick-lit (although I got kind of tired of her thinking about him all the time), it is simply a light read with good descriptions of Ireland - both the countryside and
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the inhabitants - plus a tiny bit of morals evaluation thrown in.

My only complaint with the book, and the reason it didn't rate higher, is that the writing style was attempting to mimic a journal kept following the theft. Although fairly representational of journal writing - bits of thoughts, tangents, random progress - there is a reason most people don't just publish their diaries "as is" - they are hard to read that way. The circuitous route she uses to progress the story gets a bit tiring at times, but the story does always (eventually) move forward. In addition, because I think the author truly wanted to stay true to the journal style, several of the characters she introduced remained somewhat 2 dimensional. There's no "omniscient" narrator giving the insights/thoughts of the other characters, so their development is limited only to the interactions the diarist pens herself.

Still an enjoyable read.
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LibraryThing member lahochstetler
This novel tells the story of Patricia Dolan, a middle-aged art historian who finds herself in the midst of a mid-life crisis of epic proportions. The book opens with Dolan in the midst of a large-scale art heist, which removed a Vermeer from the clutches of none less than Buckingham Palace. Dolan
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is holed up in a cottage in a tiny, remote Irish Village with the stolen painting. How an American art history professor came to find herself in this situation comprises the first three-quarters of th book. The rest brings the heist to its dramatic and suspense-filled conclusion. At the outset of the book Patricia Dolan finds herself stalled in her career, divorced, and greiving the death of her daughter. She finds solace in a long-lost, decades youngr cousin who tumbles into her life and becomes the other half of Dolan's torrid love affair. It's the fling with this Irish cousin who launches Dolan into an Irish Liberation plot to steal a British-owned Vermeer. I found this book undeniably slow to get going. The details of Patricia's relationship with her cousin Mickey were not especially interesting. What was interesting was how an unassuming professor came to find herself in the midst of an international art heist. For as exciting as this book should have been, it simply was not. The characters were not especially well-developed, and were not always believable. The most interesting entity in this book is the painting, The Music Lesson. Perhaps this is intentional. The best-expressed emotion in this book is Patricia's love for the painting. The final, dramatic ending is the highlight of the book. Getting there, however, is slow going.
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LibraryThing member VictoriaNH
The 3 stars are probably for the Vermeer paintings, which I looked up and enjoyed. The plot and its execution were boring and unbelievable.
LibraryThing member csmirl
A quick, fun novella... art theft, the IRA, an American woman hiding out with a Vermeer in the Irish countryside. Entertaining if not all that memorable.
LibraryThing member cfk
"The Music Lesson" by Katharine Weber is a small, beautifully written novel. It is staged around a mad love affair between Patricia Dolan, an Art Reference Librarian in NYC, and an Irish cousin in need of her particular expertise.

I've just about hit my limit on depressing literary novels written
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by and/or about the Irish. My daughter has also recommended Colm Toibin and Colum McCann.
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Pages

192

ISBN

0609603175 / 9780609603178
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