"Why isn't Jonathan Buckley better known? His novel of love, death and
melancholy comedy, The Great Concert of the Night, is captivating."
--John Banville
**
** David has just spent New Year's Eve alone, watching Le Grand Concert
de la Nuit, a film in which his former lover Imogen starred. In the
early hours of the new year, consoled and tormented by her ethereal
presence, he begins to write. What follows is a brilliantly various
journal, chronicling a year in the life of a thinking man. David works
as a curator at the ailing Sanderson-Perceval Museum in southern
England, whose small collection of porcelain, musical instruments,
crystals, velvet mushrooms, and glass jellyfish is as eccentric and
idiosyncratic as the long-dead collectors' tastes. David himself is a
connoisseur of the derelict and nonutilitarian, of objects removed from
the flow of time. Refusing the imposed order of a straightforward
chronology, his journal moves fluidly back and forth in time, filled
with fragments of life remembered, imagined, and recorded, from memories
of his past life with Imogen or with his ex-wife, Samantha, to
reflections on the lives and relics of female saints or the history of
medicine. There are quotations from Seneca, Meister Eckhart, and the
Goncourt brothers mixed in with the equally compelling imagined words of
fictional film directors, actors, and, always, the fascinating Imogen,
who is alive now only "in the perpetual present of the sentence." In
The Great Concert of the Night, Jonathan Buckley expertly interweaves
sexual despair, cultural critique, the plot lines of one man's quietly
brilliant life, and the problems and paradoxes of writing, especially
writing about and to the dead.
