Antonietta

I love the idea of this book. Antonietta is the favorite violin of the violin maker Stradivari, and the book follows her travels from owner to owner, through Mozart and Berlioz and Stravinsky, into the present. The book itself is structured like a symphony, with five movements and intermezzos, and Hersey uses different writing styles/formats that capture the mood of the different movements (e.g. he uses letters written back and forth to mimic the “conversation” of instruments in a symphony). When I realized that was what was going on, I was thrilled.

The first movement fascinated me. It was full of emotion and mystery and even the long descriptions of the careful creation of a violin caught my attention. The Mozart movement was funny and engaging. But by the end of the book, I was disappointed. In the end, the structure did the book in for me. Because it's a mostly true story, and because it goes in chronological order, we lose characters and, with them, our interest in what is going to happen. There's no thread, other than the violin, that carries us from the beginning, driving us to the end. And then, in the last movement, when we get to the present, we never get a satisfying ties-the-end-to-the-beginning moment. Which I want in a book, and a symphony.