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What People Have to Say About Mozart: A Novel...
ISBN 1-4134-6664-8 (softcover), ISBN 1-4134-6665-6 (hardcover)
Retail Price: softcover US$20.99, hardcover US$30.99 (can be ordered at a discount from these prices directly from Xlibris)
For My father
AUTHOR’S AND PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or deal, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely incidental.
Acknowledgements: I wish to thank Peter Berkowitz, Kalypso Nicolaidis, Lan Cao, Sara Dillon, Richard Janda, Craig Scott, and Petrus van Bork for their encouragement and advice. Helen Maroudas, A.A. Acorn, and Dr. Annalise Reisman read parts of the manuscript at an early stage, and were also helpful. My wife, Denyse Goulet, read the final versions and made many useful suggestions. I owe more than I can express to my editor, Jennifer Barclay; working with her was an education as well as a pleasure. My father, to whom this book is dedicated, helped with some research. Xlibris supplied excellent copyediting.
The phrase “the smell of Eastern Europe,” comes from the film Meeting Venus, by Istvan Szabo. The line “What’s love got to do with it?” is from the song of the same name, by Tina Turner.
Arthur Rizler, famed American novelist turned neo-conservative icon, visits Prague to lecture on Mozart; the septuagenarian Rizler is accompanied by his overprotective younger wife Maya.
The Rolling Stones upstage the Mozart event with a concert under the patronage of the Czech President; while Rizler is struggling to recoup his dignity and self-direction, a disgruntled suitor from Maya’s distant past is on his way to Prague—Jeremy Stuart, a hyper-ambitious but eccentric international attorney, has been cyberstalking Maya for years. Stuart is bent on derailing a privatization deal with rumored links to the Russia mob—but he is also tempted to settle some old scores with Maya.
An outrageous comedy of errors unfolds, putting Rizler’s marriage—and his life—at risk.
Duplicitous American diplomats; a flirtatious but jaded female foreign correspondent; an aristocratic British wonder surgeon with a secret that could destroy her career; a day-trading hotel bartender with a live-in neo-Nazi son: these are among the cast of characters that ends up shaping the destinies of Rizler, Maya and Stuart during a single fateful week, as their lives spin out of predicable direction and control towards a madcap ending that is a tribute to the film “Casablanca”.
The strange entanglement of these three personalities turn out to be haunted by demons from all of their pasts—old loves and hatreds, vulnerabilities and betrayals, emotional loose ends that have never been tied up, and which spill out and reveal themselves in surprising ways.
“Mozart” is farcical but also poignant and human; unsentimental but full of good humor and heart; a classic comedy/love story, which also casts a satirical light on western culture and politics in the late twentieth century.
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What People Have to Say About Mozart: A Novel...
New Versions of the sample chapters based on the final printed text and with all typos corrected will be available in January 2005
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