NEW YORK – A tax lawyer from Brooklyn is struck by genius while shopping for holiday presents at a Nordstrom’s in Southern California.
Unable to bear the store pianist’s Muzak version of “Ave Maria,” Liza Durbin takes over the keyboard and miraculously plays the song beyond perfection. A small crowd gathers. One woman weeps tears of joy, others ask for autographs.
How did a lawyer with a grade-school knowledge of piano do it?
Franz Schubert.
The soul of the 19th-century composer has suddenly found a home in Durbin’s body and mind.
So begins this imaginative, self-described “novel about genius, passion and hair” written by first-time author Bonnie Marson and recently published by Random House. Sony Classics has put out a companion CD featuring some of the Schubert works that play a role in the story, and Paramount Pictures has purchased the film rights.
“Sleeping With Schubert” is loads of hilarious reading for summer and filled with suspense. Will Liza get discovered? Will her secret be exposed? Will Schubert leave her before she plays at Carnegie Hall? Will he make it home to Vienna? Will he finish his “Unfinished Symphony”?
While light and entertaining, the book also raises a few serious issues about the world of classical music and about human relationships.
How does a nouvelle novelist get published by the Carnegie Hall of book publishing, inspire a classical CD of well-worn favorites and get a possible ticket to Hollywood?
“She made me believe the impossible,” said Jonathan Karp, Random House’s editor in chief. “I picked it up without any expectations, was thoroughly beguiled and captivated and transported. … With fiction, it’s either alive or never is, and this novel had the life force in it.”
Marson calls her publishing debut “the power of innocent optimism.”
At 52, she is a copywriter by occupation and an artist who paints and sculpts. About nine years ago, she wrote a short story that won honorable mention in a literary contest. Encouraged by the award, she began a new story but stopped at page seven and stashed it in a drawer. A writer-friend later read it and told her, “Just write it ‘til it’s finished.”
“If she said write a ‘book,’ I would have said she was crazy,” Marson recalled from her home in Tucson, Ariz.
“But she said, ‘Write it ‘til it’s finished,’ which is a whole different territory. That’s saying a page a day, that’s like learning to run a marathon a mile at a time, that’s like building a house brick by brick. It’s totally different from the big daunting picture of the final product.”
After one year, Marson finished her unfinished literary symphony: The 371-page “Sleeping With Schubert” was born.
Like Marson, Liza Durbin also had never been involved in her own artistic venture.
After Liza realizes that Schubert has inhabited her being, she gradually breaks the news to her parents, her former boyfriend and her fashionista sister with the bottomless bank account.
The money comes in handy when it’s time to recast Liza the lawyer into Liza the musical sensation from nowhere. Sister Cassie, who stole away and married Liza’s boyfriend from her Cornell University days, does something forbidden in the world of classical music. Aggressively promoting Liza’s Carnegie Hall debut, she proclaims Liza’s arrival with a billboard in Times Square. As if that didn’t rattle the classical establishment enough, the ad uses a doctored photo of Liza in a revealing dress.
Cassie’s savvy PR works – it helps fill Carnegie. But the book doesn’t end there.
Marson said her goal wasn’t to write a metaphorical autobiography, but to encourage other writers.
“All over the world, there are great novels sitting in desk drawers … and there’s all kinds of people who have had inventions that are brilliant that don’t get off the drawing table because they’re waiting for permission, or they’re waiting for the right time … or whatever.
“I’m trying to encourage people to open up the unfinished side and try something new.”
Bonnie Marson’s first book, “Sleeping With Schubert,” has had surprising success.
Associated Press
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