Christine Balint

Co-winner of the 2021 Viva La Novella Prize with Every Day is Gertie Day by Helen Meany (see my review), Christine Balint's novella Water Music is an exquisite portrait of the way artistic ambition often comes with a hard price to pay.

Set in 18th century Venice, it's the story of 16-year-old Lucietta, an orphan with an unknown benefactor who makes her education possible. She grows up to be a talented violinist, and is given a place at the Derelitti Convent, the (real-life) musical orphanage for girls.

Unlike *yawn* many historical novels set in Venice, Water Music isn't an homage to this most beautiful of Renaissance cities. Lucietta has a limited life, and her horizons are limited by her gender and her social class. For her there is only her waterside home, and the convent. Place is superbly realised: the reader can smell the dank fishy air; she can feel the chill of the convent's stone walls.

Lucietta grows up in foster care with her fisherman father, and her mother, a wet nurse. She guesses at her parentage, but her destiny seems a foregone conclusion:

I was reared on water and fish like a bird. So much fish that I know its smell is in the pores of my skin. When I walk in the market, I notice a lady's maid screwing up her nose and stepping away from me. In the night I lie awake, wondering if the stench will ever leave my skin. (p.1-2)

That is not what Lucietta wants:

If I stayed with Mamma, there would be no other future for me.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/08/20/water-music-by-christine-balint-2021-co-winn...… (meer)

Frankly I was disappointed with the book. The story wandered back and forth through the book and various threads were left dangling. This is such a real shame. It is wonderful that letters and other primary source material sent at the time (1854) have survived, and could have been put to much better use. I was irritated by the error on the first page that Birkenhead is near Portsmouth!

I had ancestors that left England for Australia as assisted migrants in 1854, and I had high hopes for details of what the voyage was like, and there is lots of details about this, but on the whole, for me, this book was disappointing.… (meer)

This is a fictionalized account of the life of the actress who was Hector Berlioz's muse. It's an oddly structured book, told up until the time she & Berlioz marry in 1833, so we don't actually meet Berlioz until p. 250 of the 350-page book. The story, early on, is told in chronological order, but in the latter part it increasingly jumps around in time for no apparent reason, & actually inds in 1827, the year Miss Smithson arrives in Paris & becomes a sensation. There are also odd interludes narrated in first person by one of the charcters Southern plays (Juliet, Ophelia, etc.), reflecting on their own stories. (The story itself is told in first person, too. Are these interludes really Smithson getting into character? I don't know. They, & the book as a whole, remain a mystery to me.)… (meer)