Clara by Janice Galloway

In a radical departure from her previous work, Janice Galloway's new novel is based on the life of Clara Schumann: celebrated nineteenth century concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms - who was also the wife of Robert Schumann, the mother of his eight children, and the woman who cared for him through a series of crippling mental illnesses until his terrible death in Bonn-Endenich mental asylum.
Whilst also being a meticulously researched account of two remarkable and highly dramatic musical careers - from the beginnings with her ruthlessly ambitious father to her triumphant tours of Europe, their much-postponed marriage to the Schumann's escape during the Dresden uprisings - this is a novel primarily about timeless, common things: about the inescapable influences of childhood, about creativity and marital life, about communication and silence, about how art is made and how art, in turn, may erode or save the life that nourishes it. Dismissing the clichés of Great Art and scathing in its rejection of the romantic conflation of Madness and Creativity, Clara takes as its heart an examination of the place of love in a life of increasing isolation and alienation.
Luminously written, mordantly political and disturbingly honest, Clara asks how we make a pattern of the world, what it means to be Good or Great, how scarifying choices are made, and how we endure.

This is a book you will want to share with others and I was glad to see it on the International IMPAC Dublin Literary long list. The Clara of the title is Clara Wieck Schumann, pianist, composer of chamber music and wife of composer, Robert Schumann. The novel brings us through her childhood years, dominated by an obsessive father and her music teacher, who both develops and exploits her talent. Hers is a harsh world of discipline and lost childhood as she travels around Europe as a child prodigy, but compensated by the world of music she inhabits. Her relationship with and subsequent marriage to Schumann, also a pupil of her father's, is vehemently opposed by her father and they become estranged. Although the marriage is a love match it is no less fraught because of his mental instability. Theirs is a world of music peopled by such friends as Mendelssohn, Liszt and Brahms but what shines out above all else is Clara's strength of character as she gives birth to eight children, props up her brilliant but unstable husband and supports her family by her concert work. There is a haunting quality about this beautifully written book and it gives a wonderful sense of the established music culture of the German states in the mid-nineteenth century. It deserves to make the short list.

Memer of Raheny Library Reading Group, Dublin, Ireland