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The Flight of the Wooden Dancer (Paperback)
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- Published: 07 March 2009
- Format: Paperback 208 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Fantasy | Myth & Legend Told As Fiction | Romance
- ISBN 13: 9780620430975 ISBN 10: 0620430974
- Sales rank: 876,089
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Reviews for The Flight of the Wooden Dancer
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Aubrey Paton Review, Sunday Times
`As seductively beautiful as a ballet, this book resonates like a symphony and the zeitgeist is sublimely musical, the high notes ascending to the spiritual infinite, but the melody always brought comfortably back to earth by homely touches.
Terms like `magical realism' and `metaphysical' are woolly in the extreme - rather say the lyrical prose reads like music set to words and, like the themes of any great symphony, these words evoke a medley of moods, both complimentary and contradictory.
And behind it all, playing gently and now forcefully, is the leitmotif of Beethoven's music: the Gross Fugue, the Eroica, the Seventh Symphony Allegretto and The Creatures of Prometheus Opus 43.
Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the Gods to give mankind, also gave them the gift of the arts, foremost of which was music, including the knowledge of nature encrypted in a secret language handed down in musical form.
The book interrogates the nature of the arts - all arts, but particularly music: what is music, what function does it perform? Do Eastern cultures, which value emotional improvisations on a theme, and Western cultures, who appreciate passion and technique allied to a perfect reproduction of a set of given notes, differ in their interpretations of a definition?
It is suggested that the true nature of music is to be found in every single thing around us - even total silence denotes the harmony of complete rest - and the purpose of music is, ultimately, to quiet and organize the senses.
The story of The Flight of the Wooden Dancer is secondary to the style of the storytelling: it is a prose poem of near perfection, packed with phrases that glow like precious gems caught in a sunbeam.
A delicate embroidery of words, a tapestry of classical metaphors and allusions, a simplistically sophisticated style, and an eye-opening exegesis of musical mysteries and medley' by Finnegan Bell
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