Love is Blind

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A deft and resonant alchemy of fact and fiction, of literary myth and imagination Book of the Week, Guardian

Brodie Moncur works for an Edinburgh piano manufacturer, Channon, at the turn of the 19th century. He started out as a piano tuner but now helps out with the general running of the saleroom, so when the new Paris branch is struggling the owner asks him to go over and see what he can do. Brodie has long been at odds with his father, a bullying hellfire preacher, and has no real ties in Scotland, so happily agrees. Once there, he falls in love with Lika Blum, the girlfriend of an Irish pianist. Then he stays in love with her for the rest of the book, has sex with her quite a lot, and fantasises about having sex with her most of the rest of the time. He has sex with her in Paris, the South of France, Scotland and St Petersburg. And maybe other places – I forget. Lika was... Lika. I didn't truly comprehend her reasons and the plot twist was a little bit predictable for me, we had all the clues, but at the same time I truly don't understand why she did what she did. There is nothing revolutionary in William Boyd’s style but it’s always a great pleasure to read his retro novels. It didn't matter how well you thought you knew someone, he realized. You saw what you wanted to see or you saw what the other person wanted you to see. People were opaque; another person was a mystery. Maybe he was as much a mystery to Lika as she was to him ...To be indifferent to prizes is a wonderful position to be in. I’ve won lots of prizes over the years, but they don’t make any difference to me. My sales are extremely good and that’s the position you want to be in as a novelist.” Testard, Jacques; Summerscale, Tristan (June 2011). "Interview with William Boyd". The White Review . Retrieved 10 March 2018. a b c Norman, Neil (14 January 2007). "William Boyd: A good man in Chelsea". The Independent . Retrieved 10 March 2018.

Clements, Toby (3 September 2006). "A writer's life: William Boyd". The Sunday Telegraph . Retrieved 13 March 2018. The best and the worst moments of his life take place in the northern city and in the countryside at their summer retreat, the violent emotions and bloody confrontations a true reminder of the greatest moments of classic Russian literature. I will try not to spoil them, but like a musical theme in a symphony, a simple country song that Brodie wrote down for Lika in Paris will haunt their every moment of illicit happiness. Whilst in Paris, Brodie becomes involved with a famous, virtuoso pianist, John Kilbarron, his lovely young partner Lika Blum (a Russian opera singer) and his malevolent brother Malachi ......... relationships that will become deep and tangled over the years. A couple of particular bugbears for me in the book - although in each case one hopes the author was aware even if the characters aren't. It's a straightforward (overly so) historical romance, set around the turn of the 19th Century around Europe, particularly in Scotland, Russia, Paris and the French coast (Nice, Biarritz).Now, whereof Nerias knew that his son Sedacius was caught in the snares of harlots and indeed had lusted after his brother’s wife, Ruth, and his brother’s daughter, Esther, and showed no remorse, yet Nerias suffered his son to live in his own house, yea, and fed him and his servants also. For Nerias, the Levite, was a righteous man. And the people saw the wisdom of the righteous man and Sedacius was spurned by the Levites, they spake not of him. There was a void, thereof. He was forgotten as a cloud melted by the force of the noonday sun, as smoke dispersed by a breeze. He was shadowless, a nothing, less than a mote of dust.’" Boyd, a self-confessed “Chekhov obsessive”, doesn’t tell us that Chekhov, like Brodie, had a passionate relationship with a blondwould-be opera singer whose name happened to be Lika. But as Brodie’s life lurches from one catastrophe to another, and as he and the maddeningly opaque fictional Lika make their way across Europe, the ghost of the young Scot’s real-life doppelganger never feels far away. Like Boyd’s protagonist, Chekhov had a relationship with a would-be opera singer called Lika. His ghost is never far away Der Tranensee, The Lake of Tears : That song had been the catalyst of all the happiness in his life, he thought. He thought further: and all his unhappiness, also.

Was it the lips or was it the eyes? Or was it some more subtle equation of the face? The distance between eyes equalling distance between nose and top lip. Or the precise setting of the lips between nose and chin… How did such fascination occur? One saw a thousand women’s faces in a month, say. Why was your eye – your heart, your loins – enthralled by just one? Boyd was born in Accra, Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), [3] to Scottish parents, both from Fife, and has two younger sisters. His father Alexander, a doctor specialising in tropical medicine, and Boyd's mother, who was a teacher, moved to the Gold Coast in 1950 to run the health clinic at the University College of the Gold Coast, Legon (now the University of Ghana). In the early 1960s the family moved to western Nigeria, where Boyd's father held a similar position at the University of Ibadan. [4] [5] Boyd spent his early life in Ghana and Nigeria [3] and, at the age of nine, went to a preparatory school and then to Gordonstoun school in Scotland, [5] and, after that, to the University of Nice in France, followed by the University of Glasgow, where he gained an M.A. (Hons) in English & Philosophy, and finally Jesus College, Oxford. His father died of a rare disease when Boyd was 26. Love is Blind is William Boyd's sweeping, heart-stopping new novel. Set at the end of the 19th century, it follows the fortunes of Brodie Moncur, a young Scottish musician, about to embark on the story of his life.Boyd, William (3–23 April 2020). "Teacher, chancer, survivor, spy". The Critics. Books. New Statesman. 149 (5514): 70–71.

Was it the lips or was it the eyes? Or was it some more subtle equation of the face? The distance between eyes equalling distance between nose and top lip. Or the precise setting of the lips between nose and chin ... How did such fascination occur? One saw a thousand women's faces in a month, say. Why was your eye – your heart, your loins – enthralled by just one? Clements, Toby (3 September 2006). "A writer's life". The Sunday Telegraph . Retrieved 10 March 2018.Love is Blind is an epic love story that grew in power, hooked me in totally and saw me reading long into the night to finish. What did he really know of Lika Blum? Really understand? And the answer followed: only what she had wanted him to know. It didn’t matter how well you thought you knew someone, he realized. You saw what you wanted to see or you saw what that other person wanted you to see. People were opaque; another person was a mystery. If the authorial technique apparent in Love Is Blind occasionally verges on cleverness for its own sake, there are numerous compensations. An especially effective duel set-piece around two-thirds of the way through manages simultaneously to cite Eugene Onegin (“not forgetting poor Pushkin, of course”) and, in its outrageous yet thrilling denouement, Chekhov’s famous maxim that a gun appearing in act one should be fired in act two. Likewise, James Hogg’s great novel of paranoia and pursuit, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, is referred to both in Moncur’s Scottish origins and in the fashion in which Malachi Kilbarron comes to seem an implacable, near-supernatural pursuer; the metaphysical implications remain tantalisingly alive right until the end. Love is blind” may seem like a tired proverb, but it fits literally and figuratively as a theme for the protagonist in Boyd’s new novel, which spans over a decade at the turn of the 19th century. Brodie Moncur is a 24-year-old handsome, educated gentleman, a first-rate piano tuner in Edinburgh,with perfect pitch and attention to detail. He has poor vision, though, and depends on his Franklin bifocals; otherwise the world appears “utterly aqueous.”