Though Underground Fugue is built on a musical framework, it struck me as a series of fully imagined images instead, a collection of breathing photographs that could be assembled into a collage love letter to London. Singer imagines each instant of this novel vividly, and introduces her characters by letting the reader inside their skin. The four protagonists watch the city from different perspectives, though the reader comes to know the middle-aged Esther most closely and see the story’s pacing unfold in her frame of reference. The other narratives bring depth to the novel, particularly the story of Esther’s mother Lonia. The distance in their relationship makes their similarities more touching, and Lonia’s history is so beautifully and carefully rendered that her sections were the most luminous to me.
Amir is also a more peripheral character in the book, as his father Javad lives next to Esther and Lonia, and Amir’s college studies and explorations take him away from home the majority of the time. To delve into his narrative more deeply would have been fascinating, especially considering his role in the climax of the story, but it also would have changed the story’s shape drastically, and perhaps would have unbalanced it.
The story’s threads are never tangled, though they are frequently woven together, and do create a cohesive yet vast visual portrait of London, at least for the reader who has never visited.
( )

I ran across Margot Singer's first book, THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT: STORIES, just a few years back, although it was first published nearly a decade ago. The Miami Herald called her collection "one of the most astonishing literary debuts in recent memory." I could not have agreed more. I was gobsmacked by the beauty of this woman's writing. And now, ten years later, Singer has produced her first novel, UNDERGROUND FUGUE. And it was well worth the wait. Because, well, once again - "gobsmacked." And not just because it is such a well-crafted and intricately wrought story, but because Singer has such a way with words. Listen to this, for example; read it aloud -

"Fireworks boom and pop and sprays of sparks cascade across the sky. Bonfires blaze along the the embankment, orange flames shooting up into the night."

Or this -

"The summer air is still. Sounds of the city ripple drift upward; a barking dog, the rev of a shifting engine, the brake-squeal of a bus ... In the sky, the crisscrossed contrails of a vanished plane are dissipating, two tight lines at one end, spreading into cirrus at the other, milky brushstrokes against the blue."

Do you hear it? Words like music. Poetry.

But there is a gripping and utterly human story here too, that of Esther Feinman (nee Fagin), come to London to sit with her dying mother and consider the end of her own tragedy-tinged marriage back in New York. And living next door is Javad Asghari, a divorced Iranian-born neuroscientist, and his 19 year-old son, Amir. It is the summer of 2005. The intersection of these lives is framed by real-life events: the mute "piano man" washed up on British shores in April whose identity remained a months-long mystery, and the fatal terrorist bombings of the London underground. We also get the story of Lonia, Esther's widowed, dying mother, a fugitive from the Nazi advance in 1938, fleeing first through the underground into Poland, where she met her husband Isaac, a deal-maker who finagled their escape to England. Scattered bits of Bach (played by Esther), and countless varied references to the "underground," refugees, flight and fugitives gradually give lush layers of meaning to the book's title. Singer has taken Biblical elements (the story of Esther, who married a King of Persia [ now Iran]), a dab of Dickens (Fagin), the tragedy of lost children and parents, and real-world events, and woven them all together into one of the most compelling stories I have read in years. These are characters to care about, to weep for, to mourn.

On a more personal note, I was deeply moved by Esther's death-bed vigil over her mother. I remembered the pain of watching my own mother waste away in the final weeks of her life. At 96, plagued by failing senses, loss of appetite, and crippling arthritis, she finally said, "Enough," and stopped eating. It was soon over. Singer's descriptions of Lonia's last weeks and days moved me to tears - empathizing, remembering.

There is a scene in which Lonia, working as a nanny in an English home shortly after her escape to England from Poland, is told by her young charge how to tell a story -

"At the beginning of a story, you must say, 'once upon a time,' the boy solemnly instructs her. And at the end, you must say, 'happily ever after.' That's the way it is with stories, he says."

But life is so much more complicated than such stories. The 'happily ever after' doesn't always happen. UNDERGROUND FUGUE bears this out. And yet, and yet ... there are so many beautiful things in here. Margot Singer has taken the art of storytelling to its highest level. I loved this book so much I did not want to see it end. And at the same time I could not help racing through the last hundred pages or so, because I simply HAD to know what happened next. . Yup. Loved it. So I will paraphrase that Miami Herald guy and say that this is one of the most astonishing first novels in recent memory. It is simply superb. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )