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    The Lost Musicians
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    The Lost Musicians
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    The Lost Musicians
    Ebook376 pages3 hours

    The Lost Musicians

    By William Heinesen

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    This is a new translation by W. Glyn Jones of William Heinesen’s masterpiece and one of the most important Scandinavian novels of the 20th century.
    Music is at the heart of this book. The devotion to it of a group of amateur musicians forming the Boman Quartet prevents a series of dramatic events from turning into heart-rending tragedy. Music enables each of the musicians to rise above his own bleak situation. But there is humour, too, especially in the satirical, larger-than-life portrayal of the local sectarians, led by the bank manager Ankersen, as they seek in vain to break the spirit of the musicians. And humour of a more earthy kind in Janniksen, the huge blacksmith who is completely at the mercy of his petty-minded sectarian wife.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDedalus
    Release dateJul 25, 2017
    ISBN9781910213629
    Unavailable
    The Lost Musicians
    Author

    William Heinesen

    William Heinesen (1900-1991) was born in Torshavn in the Faroe Islands, the son of a Danish mother and Faroese father, and was equally at home in both languages. Although he spent most of his life in the Faroe Islands he chose to write in Danish as he felt it offered him greater inventive freedom. Although internationally known as a poet and a novelist he made his living as an artist. His paintings range from large-scale murals in public buildings, through oil to pen sketches, caricatures and collages. It is Dedalus's intention to make available all of William Heinesen's novels in new translations by W. Glyn Jones. So far published are The Black Cauldron, The Lost Musicians, Windswept Dawn, The Good Hope, which won The Nordic Prize for Literature , and Mother Pleiades. In 2017 Dedalus will publish William Heinesen's last novel, The Tower at the Edge of the World and in 2018 Noatun. William Heinesen is generally considered to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Scandinavian novelists of the twentieth century.

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    • 4/5
      The lost musicians was apparently mostly written during the Second World War, when the Faroes were effectively a self-governing British protectorate, cut off from German-occupied Denmark, and many Faroese lost their lives serving in the Royal Navy or supplying Britain with fish. But it's set during the more cheerful times of Heinesen's childhood before the First World War. A little group of unconventional characters get together regularly in a basement in a dodgy neighbourhood of Tórshavn to play string quartets, sing, discuss poetry, and have a few drinks (or a lot of drinks) with their friends. Most of them are relatively impoverished and live from crisis to crisis by doing various odd jobs - one is a ferryman, another sets type on the newspaper, another teaches and hangs wallpaper, etc. - but they are united by their belief that the things that matter most in life are friendship, love, and aesthetic pleasure, in particular expressed through music. Set against them is the bank-manager Ankersen, a former drunkard himself, who has accepted Jesus into his life and is driven to share the Good News and sweep away the sinfulness he sees all around him. He founds - and then disagrees with and splits off from - his own nonconformist sect, and with the best possible intentions, he becomes directly or indirectly responsible for smashing up the lives of the musicians and their friends. This is a theme for a novel that you can easily imagine Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Gottfried Keller, or Sinclair Lewis tackling, in their different ways - Heinesen is a bit different, though, because for him the emphasis is always on the sheer fun his characters are having, and even what would for anyone else be the most tragic moments entirely fail to take themselves seriously. The movement of the plot is left to take care of itself and the focus is always on incident. There is no political agenda, only a human one - Heinesen presumably wants us to see the danger of good intentions that fail to take account of the individuals they are dealing with, but his main point seems to be that the joy of music and poetry is something that ultimately triumphs, even in the worst situations: definitely something that needed to be said in the 1940s.