'Lucy McBride, aged thirteen, is roused from a summer slumber one summer day by the haunting music coming from the stereo. It is a life changing moment and she devotes herself to the study of the cello - for "that", she decides, is what she wants to do with her life. This leads to a fascination, an obsession with the artist playing that music, Fortuny. She not only devotes herself to the cello, but Fortuny - the embodiment of the myth of the Romantic artist - "the most enchanting of myths" - and, at the age of twenty-three, goes to Venice to meet him. The novel then describes what happens when someone attempts to live out a dream.' (Publisher's blurb)
The Love Song of Lucy McBride
St Leonards
:
Allen and Unwin
,
1998
Z187624
1998
single work
novel
'And she knew beyond doubt, that whatever Fortuny may have achieved in life, he would have thrown it all away, just to be Lucy, right now, standing at the lights, with it all in front of her. When thirteen-year-old Lucy McBride is awoken one afternoon in her Brisbane garden by the haunting sounds of a cello, she falls in love with the music. Later, she falls in love with a post-war photograph of the musician, Paolo Fortuny, an aristocratic Venetian maestro. An obsession with Fortuny's world, art and the dreams of being one of its elect becomes the secret passion of her adolescent years. But when she is finally given her dream and enters the reality of Fortuny's life, its closed society and Old World assumptions, she dismantles her hero with a ruthlessness that causes her to define everything she's ever lived for. ' (Publication summary)
