Magnolia Brown, a wannabe Shakespearean actress in New York, is convinced by her sleazy director to travel to Vienna for singing lessons, there prevailing for accommodation and introductions on a distant relative on her white, maternal side. Her father being African-American and leaving her with dark skin soon exposes her there to some of the more obvious expressions of present-day prejudice and xenophobia.

Also the relative she stays with is obsessed with tripe soup, her dolls, and everything being just so; and the singing teacher she gets introduced to is… I hesitate to say hypochondriac, as his various colds and flus and pneumonias certainly seem real enough, but they also seem very likely to be psychosomatic. To the extent they have a physical cause, they aren’t helped by the fact that his mother’s cure of choice for his illnesses was to play Schubert at them, so that he’s never really had a chance to be healthy.

I didn’t really like either of these characters a lot, though I could feel a certain distant empathy for both, so my reaction to them finding feelings for each other is an equally distant, “Oh well, good luck to them, I guess.”

What I did like was the the protagonist of the second timeframe, about 80 years before present, in the time of Empress Sisi. Rosa is the illegitimate daughter of a cook and her (married) employer, and tells (in a notebook Magnolia finds in her relative’s house) the tale of her journey to Vienna to seek her fortune as a servant, and how this turns out for her. We know from the start that how this turns out is she is executed for the murder of her husband, but the twists and turns along the way are engaging, and Rosa is as likeable as she is initially naive, so this narrative, interspersed with the present-day, for me rescues the rest of the novel.

But I also liked the structure and the contrasts between Vienna’s culture and its bigotry; between a morbidity that pervades both timelines, and the passions (both romantic and musical) that the title alludes to. ( )

After recently moving to Vienna, I was told to read this book and was really fascinated! ( )