"The Gustav Sonata" by Rose Tremain

An audio book. It's 1947. Switzerland. Gustav's 5. His mother, Emilia, is poor. She defends the reputation of her dead, apparently disgraced husband Erich. A new boy, Anton, turns up at school. He can play the piano. He and Gustav become friends, going to each other's houses. Anton's Jewishness and affluence makes Emilia wary.

It's a 3rd-person narrative, Gustav the focal character. Sometimes his thoughts are from the future, looking back on the described incidents. His thoughts in the 1940s often seem too sophisticated. The phrasing seems lax to me in places too, and slow. The child-PoV's nothing special.

When Gustav's 10, a youth exposes himself to him. Anton fails to win a national piano competition because of nerves. Anton's family takes Gustav with them on holiday to Davos (where Gustav's parents had once holidayed). The 2 boys find what they think is an abandoned sanitorium in the woods. They imagine having patients, one of them being Ludwig, the sex-exposer. When patients die the boys burn them in the big ovens.

We go back to when Emilia sees Erich for the first time. She immediately wants to sleep with him. He's a policeman. They marry. He pushes her in a moment of anger when he was feeling neglected. The fall causes a premature birth. He's dismissed for falsifying documents to let Jews in. Emelia leaves him to live with her unpleasant, never-married mother. Erich sleeps with Emelia's best Lottie, who's also his boss's wife. Emilia returns. Lottie breaks the affair off. Gustav is born. Lottie wants a child too, and asks to see Erich again. He rushes to her and has a heart-attack at her door.

We go forward to when Gustav is 50. He feels that his mother never loved him. With an unexpected inheritance from Emilia's mother he's bought a little guest-house. Anton's become a music teacher at the local school. They're both unmarried. Gustav begins to wonder who had betrayed his father. He meets Lottie and discovers things. A visiting English Colonel tells him about Belsen. When 52, Anton's discovered by a talent scout, Hans, and goes with him to Geneva.

In 1992 Gustav's guest-house begins to lose money. While it's being renovated he spends 2 months in Paris with his father's ex-lover, Lottie. He indulges her. It emerges (no great surprise) that Gustav and Anton are gay. At the end, after Anton's mental breakdown and Gustav's selling of his guest-house, the 2 are living in Davos with Anton's mother. Anton plans to complete a piece he started in Geneva called "The Gustav Sonata".

There's far too much boiler-plate prose for my liking. Some things ("Hans", pigs, etc) are repeated, though the significance isn't obvious to me. And what's the colonel for? In old age, several of the characters regret not having confessed their longings. Gustav remains caring and exploited throughout.

Other reviews

• Kate Kellaway (At every turn, Tremain knows when and how to let us read between the lines and see beneath the Swiss surfaces. [...] And what ultimately matters here – the heart of this remarkable and moving novel – is Anton’s imperative. He tells Gustav: “We have to become the people we always should have been.”)
• Eric Stinton (Yet for all of her mastery of conducting personal narratives against a historically turbulent background, Tremain is at her best when capturing the quaint charm of small-town life and the fuzzy innocence of childhood. [...] While the novel is saturated with unresolved emotions and unspoken tensions, it arrives at a beautiful, wholly satisfying conclusion.)
• Lucy Scholes (It’s cleverly layered and finely woven together in a way that’s eminently pleasing to read: there’s something soothingly melodic about the pace of Tremain’s prose. But hidden amongst this harmony are a series of individual notes that seem strikingly off-key. For example, I’m pretty sure nobody in 1940s rural Switzerland ever said “I’ve got a cool idea”; and neither am I convinced that any 1930s hausfrau was as brazenly sexually empowered as Tremain invents – especially not in über-conservative Switzerland, a country that didn’t even give women the vote until the 1970s. More problematically, I was left feeling entirely unsure of whether I should have been rooting for Gustav and Anton’s relationship or not. The narrative arc suggests yes, but Anton is so distressingly oblivious to Gustav’s support and affection, I couldn’t help but want the latter to just give up trying)