Lisa Lenard-CookCritiques

Sensitively and poetically, this story deals with with what is often considered difficult subject matter - the concentration camp at Terezin / Theresienstadt, Los Alamos and the creation of the atomic bomb, as well as the fear of unveiling one's blocked memories and why the mind has shuttered them away.

Through the language of music theory, the primary character describes her understanding of the events of the 20th century which have affected her and her family. Her mother shares in this language called music and her father and husband, both scientists, do not appear to relate to her artistry and sensitivity. So much of her life's memories are a blur or even blocked from her conscience. Fragments come to the fore and her curiosity leads her to personal enlightenment.

For such a short story, there is much on which to chew and ponder.

[Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.]

I've discussed here before the inherent challenge I feel about doing critical looks at Holocaust fiction -- that although you can't just stand up one day and say, "Okay, that's it, we have enough novels about the Holocaust now, and we really don't need anymore" (after all, the Holocaust is the very definition of a story that should be endlessly discussed until the end of time, simply so that the story is never forgotten), nonetheless it makes it very difficult as a literary critic to do an actual honest literary criticism of any particular new one, because the story is just so familiar by now, and the impetus to "never forget the past" can manytimes clash badly with the equally important impetus as an author to write an entertaining and thought-provoking three-act narrative story that is fresh and original. And so it is with Lisa Lenard-Cook's new Dissonance as well, although to her credit she at least attempts to approach the story in a new way; it's ostensibly the story of a contemporary piano teacher in Los Alamos, New Mexico, who mysteriously one day learns that she is the recipient in the will of an elderly Jewish composer she's never met, discovering that she has inherited a series of original songs on sheet paper that have never been performed and that the general public largely is not aware of, her quest to track down their origins taking her into the story of this elderly composer's time at the concentration camps as a youth. But that said, the book indeed suffers from the exact problem I'm talking about, that it was a chore to get through precisely because I already knew every single story beat that was going to happen well before I ever turned the next page, which is problematic when you're presenting your story as a mainstream novel instead of as a history textbook; and so I will do the wimpy thing I always do in these situations and simply give the book an exact middle-of-the-road score, because I am uncomfortable giving a piece of Holocaust fiction a score that's either too high or too low, even though Dissonance deserves them both simultaneously. This should all be kept in mind before you pick up a copy yourself.

Out of 10: 7.5

Don't be fooled by how short this novel is. It will tear at your heart strings in all the right ways. The language of this book is absolutely beautiful. While there are sections that seem slow, the narrative pulls you through.
There aren't many books I would read a second time, but this is one of them.

I had mixed feelings about this book. The subject matter is important, the plot well mapped out, but I just never really engaged with any of the characters. I'm not sorry at all that I read it, but it was a slower read than I'd anticipated.

Lisa Lenard-Cook’s Dissonance is a crafted and finely tuned novel. It is a slow burn, in the best sense: a patient rendering of character and a thoughtfully developed narrative. Lenard-Cook anchors the story using music theory as a device to make links and convey the emotions and motivations of her characters in overarching metaphor. It may be to the reader’s advantage to have some knowledge of music theory but for those who don't, concepts such as polytonality, consonance, dissonance, and cadence are conveyed as landscapes being revealed to the reader for the first time. Throughout the novel, there is an underlying rhythm of question and answer – call and response - the conflict between ‘complete’ and ‘unresolved’ cadences in the lives of the characters, the choices they make, and the consequences of those choices. It is conflict that goes to the heart of the human experience, a dialectic that has the potential to find resonance in the experience and emotional life of the reader. Dissonance is a novel that enriches, a love story, a narrative with historical scope and contemporary relevance.

The dissonance found in 20th century music is the direct result of a world at variance with itself. Over an extended period of time the discord reveals itself in the arts.

“One way modern composers have chosen to address the increased
fragmentation of life in the twentieth century is to create a more
fragmented music.” (p. 77)

In her recently re-issued novella, Dissonance, Lenard-Cook elaborates on this theme by focusing on the irony (although irony is not a direct theme, it is nonetheless inherent within the stories context) experienced during the Holocaust when the elite Nazi's jailed artists at the Terezin Concentration Camp for their entertainment. Jews were not valued enough to be allowed to work, go to school, or even live, yet could play beautiful chamber and symphonic music for Nazi's before being shipped off to their death at Auschwitz, if they lived long enough to make it there.

Never being able to fathom the degree to which man can manifest his prejudices, Jewish musicians continued to compose concert music while at Terezin. In essence, they had hope for a future tomorrow when they could share their creations. After the war, in the later part of the century, manuscripts that were saved by the few remaining musicians and their families, were collected, produced, and published in a series of moving CD's - Terezin Music Anthology.

Lenard-Cook's exposition is intricately composed. She creates a series of parallel themes intrinsic to the development of her story. For example: music and physics, harmony and dissonance, prejudice and impartiality; and likewise between characters: Hana and Anna - two musicians separated by a generation, but connected by Anna's mother, also a musician - fathers and husbands, mothers and daughters.

“Someone once suggested that music sounds the way emotions
feel, that music reveals the hidden patterns of our inner lives in
the same way that mathematics reveals the outer, physical world.” (p. 63)

These relationships are central to the book's plot and thematic structures.

The author's writing is erudite, she has researched her subject matter and translated it with sensitivity. Her style and narrative are at times eloquent while at other times tedious. She has difficulty arriving at the main point of her story. The reader becomes frustrated following her digressions. Once Lenard-Cook reaches her peak conflict, it is anti-climatic because it does not match the scope of the intended novel. Much of the resolution does not seem plausible. The denouement is academic and the central structure is marginalized. It is a major flaw in an otherwise well conceived novel.½

The word that best describes "Dissonance" by Lisa Lenard-Cook to me is, perhaps ironically, resonance. Its 149 pages, singularly and together, resonate with me. Perhaps it's in part due to my childhood days as a piano student ....but I believe it has more to do with Ms Lenard-Cook's ability to tell the stories of fascinating, fallible, authentic, disparate, and interconnected human beings - particularly those of Anna and Hana - simultaneously and thoroughly..in only 149 pages!!! On top of this, she also manages to tackle a bit of the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki without seeming gratuitous about these hefty topics in the process. A quick read, a wonderful read. Ends on a bit of a surprising note, as per the novel's title!

Lenard-Cook weaves the challenging narratives of these diverse women through music. In Dissonance, she illustrates the lives and experiences of the harrowing past and the hopeful future with the staying presence of music; demonstrating how it binds us together.

What a beautiful and moving book. It tells the story of Anna, a piano teacher who finds out she has inherited some very special pieces of music form a woman she does not know. Through the music, and Anna's own personal journey, she uncovers a past that has been forgotten. Stories from the Holocaust, stories about her mother and stories about herself. This book moved me in so many ways; it is beautifully written, and although there are may musical references, you do not need to be a musician to understand the parallels between life and the music that Anna is describing.

This book reads like a real labour of love. It intermingles the story of Anna, a piano teacher haunted by her perceived lack of performing genius, her dead mother and her scientific rationalist father and husband, with that of Hana Weissova, composer and holocaust survivor. The two are brought together after Hana's death by a mysterious bequest of music to Anna, and through this she discovers much about herself and her mother - as well as the terrible events of the holocaust. It's a well plotted and carefully written story, which I think probably has considerable personal meaning to its author. It deals with all of the big issues of love and death; survival, creation and discussion. But for me it felt too controlled and too mannered. Music is, as the author writes, not a tidy affair when done properly. Nor is writing. And nuclear war, death and destruction are big, uncontrollable horrors. This book needed to give all of these some more space to breathe - some more messy anger, big love, more tears and less restraint.

Anna, a piano teacher from Los Alamos, inherits journals and piano scores from Hana, a woman she does not know. This slim book slowly unravels the mystery until their connection is revealed at the end.

I found this a thoughtful read. The author delighted in unexpected juxtapositions of the past and present, different kinds of destruction and love, and ways of finding hope and redemption. I enjoyed finding music in some form on almost every page. This could have come across as forced, but I found it quite beautiful as a thread that links us all.

Recommended.

I quickly lost interest in this book. I did not like the author's writing style and felt that they jumped back and forth from point of view to point of view. This made it hard to get a real sense of the characters. Overall, a bust.

I really did enjoy the stories of Anna and Hana in this novel. Hana's especially grabbed my attention and I found myself looking forward to her sections. The thing that bothered me about the book was the breaks to discuss musical theory and physics. They read like textbook passages, just listing definitions. It was a chore to read through these parts and I felt the book would have been a lot better without them. I'm also not sure why Anna entirely blocked huge chunks of her childhood memories. I don't feel like that was ever really explained and it didn't entirely make sense. Overall it was an enjoyable book and Hana's stories especially kept me reading.½

I received a finished copy from the publisher as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

Sometimes a book just hits the spot for the reader. This is a story of suppressed memory, self discovery, forgiveness, and redemption. A piano teacher in New Mexico inherits the musical scores and diaries of a Holocaust survivor an begins a search to find out why these things were left to her. Loved it. This was not the one I hoped to win in the LT July batch, but I think I liked it better than I would have liked the ones I didn't win. I got lucky with this.

There are two strands to this short novel that eventually come together by the end of the book. The first strand has to do with the life of a woman in contemporary times who teaches piano to children in a small town. She discusses her life and her love for music, her difficult relationship with her distant husband and her memories of her parents. Her mother was also a piano teacher and a very gifted
player while her father was supposed to have been the infamous person who worked at a lab in
Los Almos New Mexico and made the decision where to drop the atomic bond which eventually ended the second world war. The second strand of the novel and the more interesting one for me, involves a
Czech Jewish woman who was a notable piano player and composer, eventually interned in a concentration camp and then imigrates to the United States where she eventually comes into contact and forms a deep friendship with the narrator's mother. The story involving the European pianist is
far more interesting to me because it deals with the hardship that Jews faced during the second worl war. The other story, about the contemporary piano instructor was not as interesting to me because
a lot of the woman's ideas center around music theory and I felt like she was lecturing me on topics
that were of interest to her.
I found it very difficult to make it to the end of this book even though I did finish it. I found the writing
to be competent but the story just didn't interest me.There is far too much discussion on the theory
of music and art for my liking and the story of the woman's contemporary life just didn't apeal to me.
There is a major surprise at the end of the book that could be plausible, I suppose, but I really didn't
buy into it because so much of the book just struck me as being implausible. Even though the narrator's father is supposed to be the person who made the decision where the atomic bomb is dropped, I just didn't buy into that either. All in all I can't recommend this book to anyone because I just
found it to be a very dull read.

this book had lots of potential however, it tried to tell too many stories at once. Anna Kramer is a piano teacher unfulfilled in life. She inherits journals from a composer Hana Weissova who is a concentration camp survivor. Hana's story is told as well. Hana's story meshes with Anna's mother, Katherine Holz and her father who activated the atomic bomb. All these characters are interesting however i had trouble really caring as the stories are skimmed over.

This is a short and calmly narrated novel that I enjoyed overall.

I found the descriptions of Hana's life more engaging than Anna's parts, but that's partly down to my own specific interest in accounts of the Holocaust.

I also felt some things were left a little unexplained/unclear, but not to the detriment of the plot or enjoyment of the story. Some of Anna's sections veered a little too much into essays/theorising for my liking, but on the whole I was rather captivated by this book.½

Lisa Leanard-Cook’s novel, Dissonance, is a symphony with familiar themes performed in 21st Century motif. It is a story of transitions brought on by intervals of character relationships that are not complete, that beg resolution and harmony. It may take a life time to resolve the dissonance of safety and horror, love and loss, sharing and repression, religiosity and isolation, self-acceptance and doubt, peace and war. Some characters make their transitions sooner than others, but all are drawn toward personal harmony.

The questions that the characters ask themselves involve the structures of their lives. Like 20th Century symphonies, the ambitious actions of their lives may involve a dramatic first movement of early development, a lyrical second period of love and adulthood, a dance-like third movement of career and talent expressiveness, and a rousing triumphant achievement of goals. However, the 21st Century symphonic structure may reflect more complex symphonies with unpleasant dissonance mixed with harmony and more than four movements. Characters’ lives may be chaotic requiring tolerance of ambiguity, fear, and self-doubt. But even these complex psychological states seem to drive the characters toward harmonic resolution of their relationships.

The structure of the novel is contemporary, involving short sections within long chapters. Time periods are in the sections covering pre-World War II in Europe, the holocaust, the development of nuclear weapons, and current nuclear research in New Mexico. The importance of the performance of music of the main character Anna Kramer is presented through her own behaviors and observations. Enhancement of Anna’s appreciation of listening to music and her performance as a pianist is revealed in an epistolary style as she reacts to a diary and sheet music she inherits from a virtuoso pianist and Jewish holocaust survivor Hana Weissova.

This is a very good short novel (149 pages) and I recommend it highly. Readers do not have to have a special knowledge of musical terms and may gain some new knowledge about classical music.

Anna Kramer is a quiet narrator of this novel. She is a piano teacher of children and seems to put down her playing ability. She is left some journals and music scores by Hana Weissova, a woman she does not know and become obsessed by this mysterious bequest. Through Hanna's diaries we learn something of her life as a Jew in the Second World War in Terezin concentration camp and the horror of her time there.
Anna's life seems settled and happy and we hear about her childhood with a pianist mother and a nuclear physicist father who decided the atomic bomb should be dropped on Hiroshima and other hidden emotions start to emerge.
This short novel seemed to be sauntering along in a fairly uneventful way that was not engaging me much for about two thirds of the novel and then suddenly it came alive and made a lot more sense and by the end I enjoyed it. It is well written and interesting. At first Anna seemed very closed and unemotional and the reasons for this emerged slowly.½

This slim novel explores the intricacies of daughter - parent relationships with a framework provided by the intertwining themes of the development of music theory and the Holocaust. If that sounds ambitious that's because it is. The complexity is increased by the variety of forms in the writing, from essays to diary entries to more classic first person narrative, though even that switches from one character to another.
All in all it works, and the different subjects do inform each other and weave together well. The forms of writing provide a texture to the piece that is pleasing. For me there was one too many parallel female characters to keep track of, and I lost the thread occasionally. An interesting piece of work that I'm glad I read.½

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it highly, especially to those who love classical music. The author does a masterful job of pulling together music, family relationships, and the holocaust. I am amazed at what she was able to capture in only 150 pages -- a sign of a truly gifted writer. The only reason I didn't give it the full 5 stars is that i wanted the story to continue... Read it, you won't be sorry!½

Not a bad book, a little to US centric for my conservative UK tastes but excellent characterisation and an interesting mix of Holocaust, family, effects and music. Well worth a read

jm

I found this a profoundly melancholic book which is no bad thing. The melancholy of the lonely piano teacher was written very well. Interspersed with this is the story of a concentration camp survivor who survived because of her music. Initially there appears to be no connection between the two women and watching the relationship between the alive Anna and the dead Hana was fascinating as it developed.

The only reason this doesn't has five stars is that I found the writing styles and voices of the two woman to be too similar.

In its way, twentieth-century composers' use of dissonant chords in their music is a fitting metaphor for events in the twentieth century.

I paraphrased the opening line. This short novel/novella was a gripping read and highly recommended. A pianist, Anna Kramer, inherits diaries and scores of music composed by a woman she's never met. Why does Anna in particular receive that legacy? Intrigued, she sets out to unravel that mystery. The author brings the setting, the Los Alamos, New Mexico of today to life for me; the author must live there. The author is involved in the Santa Fe Writers' Project.

Anna examines these documents with an eagle eye; the novel moves back and forth through the present-day; the composer Hana Weissova's life, much of it through her internment in Terezín [Theresienstadt] Concentration camp in Czechoslovakia by the Nazis; and excerpts from the diaries. Terezín was designated as a 'showplace' concentration camp; residents were mostly artists, musicians, and others in the arts. The story leads through Anna's investigations to a shattering conclusion. I liked very much how the story married the past and the present through the power of music. Hana had written a symphony, partly based on a Jewish lullaby, both important to the story. I liked the author's little digressions on musical form and history, assuming some knowledge of musical structure and history, but nothing over the head of an ordinary music lover, such as myself. It was a beautiful, human story, the denouement a bit disappointing [ah, dissonant] in some respects. It brought the story into euphonious harmony, with others. The writing was well-done and stark. To me, the subject of the novel reflected the inharmonious Zeitgeist of our times.

I won this through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

I received this book through the Early Reviewer's people and I'm so happy that I did. It came in the mail on a Saturday when all I was doing was reading a book for my book club. I opened up Dissonance and didn't close it until I had finished it. I think it was an amazing story, so well written, so complex and yet so easy to read. The only part I had a bit of trouble with were the musical explanations. I feel like they were too technical. For a music lover I'm sure they were great, but not for me. I am always so in awe of an author that can accomplish so much in such a short book.