Glenn Gould wakes up in a hotel room he has no memory of checking into, alarmingly separated from the potpourri of pills that permit him to navigate life. The scene he discovers in his room is as bizarre as it is macabre\u2014a woman has been hacked to death with a hatchet, and a record player that is not his own is playing a recording of him (he doesn\u2019t own that either) performing the Goldberg Variations on repeat. Stuffed in the victim\u2019s mouth is a crumpled piece of paper on which is printed a hostile review of one of his performances, written by the critic Paul Henry Lang. Later, Gould learns the dead woman is a housekeeper who thought ill of him. Detective Inspector Dziurzynski interviews Gould and points out plainly how incriminating the scene is. Gould protests he is not only innocent but bewildered, lost in a \u201cplacid, medicinal haze,\u201d his \u201cnervous system in a state of fray\u201d; the musician\u2019s relentlessly neurotic condition is vividly and humorously depicted by the author in this enchantingly peculiar novel. Lang turns up dead next\u2014he is killed within a day of the housekeeper\u2019s demise\u2014but Gould insists, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that his hands are clean. The possibilities are many; maybe Gould is being framed? Of course, if he is not the killer, surely his life is in grave danger. As Dziurzynski notes: \u201cIf what I believe is correct, Mister Gould, there is someone very dangerous standing behind you, in the dark, breathing down your neck. They\u2019ve proven themselves not only vicious, but calculating. Patient. In one way or another, however unwittingly, you are their link to whichever macabre impulse fuels this blood-thirsty endeavor.\u201d<\/p>\n
D\u2019Stair has composed a grippingly deconstructed version of the classic crime drama\u2014not only is it never entirely obvious who the killer is, it\u2019s never certain Gould can rule himself out. It might even be the case there is another Glenn Gould somewhere, a doppelg\u00e4nger of sorts. The reader will never solve the crime or predict the novel\u2019s defiantly strange ending\u2014that is a decisive neatness the author seems intent on undermining. D\u2019Stair paints a dizzying picture that is deliciously complex; apparently, there is nothing as philosophically intractable as murder. As Dziurzynski declaims: \u201cMurder is gonna be the most convoluted\u00a0kerfuffle imaginable. Not even imaginable! A happenstance so outside typical human experience the truth of any instance would sound farcical if laid out by barristers to jury-folk.\u201d The dialogue between Dziurzynski and Gould can be a touch cute\u2014snappy one-liners are exchanged with a manufactured alacrity and a contrived rhetorical refinement. But even this literary hyperbole seems appropriate if understood as an ironic comment on the detective genre, a reinvention of a style that must be as much commandeered as it is renovated. Either way, the prose is never a fatal distraction, and one can\u2019t help but be fascinated by Gould\u2019s compelling amalgam of genius and mental disability. This is a thrillingly unconventional novel, one that successfully reinvents an old literary convention from the inside.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Glenn Gould wakes up in a hotel room he has no memory of checking into, alarmingly separated from the potpourri of pills that permit him to navigate life. The scene he discovers in his room is as bizarre as it is macabre\u2014a woman has been hacked to death with a hatchet, and a record player […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2274"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}