Early on, Canone Inverso by Italian novelist Paolo Maurensig suggests an intricate story. An unnamed first-person narrator, in London for an auction, buys a 300-year-old violin—a Stainer with a gargoyled head carved into its pegbox. Back in a hotel room, any time alone with the new purchase is short for there is an interruption. It is an agitated man, a writer, who, after unsuccessfully offering to buy the violin, narrates a mysterious Viennese encounter with a tavern virtuoso who allegedly had, a year earlier, the same violin. The writer’s tale segues to Jeno Varga’s sorrowful tale of how a virtuoso ended up playing in taverns for wine and schillings. Violinist Varga’s words at this third level of narration make up most of Canone Inverso. But be warned that author Maurensig, with his obvious love of music, does reprise this tricky three-level narrative start with a mirrored, bookend coda. But that is getting ahead of the story.

A generous, highbrow take on this novel would probably run as follows: A tragic story about two violin prodigies, Canone Inverso offers a literary fugue on sacrifice and suffering endured by Jeno Varga, a Hungarian bastard, and classmate Kuno Blau, an Austrian blue blood. At the selective Musicum Collegium in post-Great War Austria, they, like contrapuntal voices, support and save the other’s genius from harsh educators given to famous Prussian discipline. Unfortunately, the times favor neither Jeno nor Kuno. Offstage, the descending bass line in this fugal composition sounds—the rise to power of Nazis in Europe during the Thirties, unleashing the evil of mass madness. This canone inverso, this fugue of emotion with a falling rhythm, ends the friendship of Jeno and Kuno.

While the musical analogy is interesting, the look and feel of the story led this reviewer to a more common, unvarnished reading of Canone Inverso: It is a variation on the Gothic mystery.

The Prince and the Pauper meet The Addams Family is not an altogether flip description. Especially when Jeno (following his mother’s death) spends one summer with Kuno at the latter’s family digs. A suitably remote Gothic structure, a castle so large that “a few places haven’t seen the light of day for at least a century.” A stroke-victim grandmother who can only speak the name of her missing son and then weeps uncontrollably. An uncle buried in the family plot (but is that really his body in the grave?). A brother who suffers the tragedy of falling in love with his brother’s wife. And most of all, terrible family secrets.

Gothic or not, the reader expects resolution to any mystery. Canone Inverso offers a finale that for surprise value is stunning and ingenious. Though tying up loose narrative ends, after a fashion, Maurensig’s resolution misses the mark of convincing inevitability. Being shy of inevitability probably ties to a skimpiness of character motivation. Undercooked causes for the tragedy of Jeno and Kuno are several. Harsh instructors at the Musicum Collegium (kin to the Hollywood concept for Shine). Original Sin (a character’s assertion that musicians are the fated descendants of Cain [Genesis 4:21] gets more than one mention). The malevolent tide of Nazis in the world. And then there is the matter of Kuno’s illness.

When upstaged by Jeno in a violin duet, the psychological defeat sends Kuno to the floor in an epileptic fit. After his seizure, Kuno is bedridden for days. And with scant medical evidence to support such a connection, Maurensig implies epilepsy was a causal precursor to schizophrenic psychosis and extended hospitalization. That Maurensig invoked schizophrenia—giving “unreliable narrator” a fresh interpretation—overturned Canone Inverso for this reviewer. Shades of that old narrative letdown, “Omigod! I’m awake and it was all a dream!”

To properly put the reservations about Canone Inverso into context would mean a giveaway of the story’s ending and spoil Canone Inverso for anybody, who, despite the forgoing, chose to pick up the book. Nonetheless, if you would like a capsule summary of what happens in Canone Inverso, simply e-mail the reviewer with “Canone Inverso summary” on the subject line.

Copyright ©1998 Charlie Dickinson & Savoy Magazine.
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