The Goldberg Variations

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

Harpsichordist Liliane Kulainn is in the bedchamber of her home,
preparing to perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations before a gathering of
30 acquaintances and intimates. This ingeniously structured novel
consists of 30 interior monologues (corresponding to the 30 variations)
that take place during Liliane’s concert, an event that “unfolds
like a midsummer night’s dream.”

The audience members are an eclectic mix of musicians, aesthetes,
misanthropes, and ideologues whose preoccupations range from the mundane
to the metaphysical. (The music critic’s wife worries about menstrual
overflow, the model about “the horrors humanity has inflicted on
itself.”) Their responses to Liliane’s performance run the gamut
from enthralment to indifference to Marxist outrage. Liliane herself is
variously seen as remote, exotic, traitorous, vampiric, self-denying,
and, to her father, a “perfect stranger.”

Like the Variations themselves, this fascinating novel rewards us not
with a resolution but rather with marvelously intricate harmonies that
“ris[e] up to the unknown.”