by explaining that a cadenza is a passage designed for musicians to show off.  The author, who according to an interview, “probably read a hundred books” in writing this one, shows off unabashedly, fortunately with the chops to pull it off. Having eschewed straightforward narrative, Cohen reels off instead a string of subplots, many of which are engaging. There are the two cutthroat Asian female students who share a practice piano, until one slips razor blades between the keys. There’s the neighbor who hires Schneidermann to feign giving him piano lessons so he can discreetly orchestrate an affair. And there’s the central event, wherein Schneidermann abruptly exits in the middle of a screening of Schindler’s List. Laster files a Missing-Persons report,  but Schneidermann is missing in a more metaphysical sense; a composer doomed to obscurity apart from Laster’s cadenza, he remains a mystery even to his closest confidant.

Throughout, the specter of the Holocaust looms over the characters and the novel. Unlike Laster, Schneidermann is a survivor of the camps, and this dichotomy is one we, like Laster, aren’t ever allowed to forget. Laster bears a sort of non-survivor’s guilt, recognizing that while he was able to escape to America to live out his “prodigyhood,” Schneidermann, subject to the immediate threat of extermination, was forced to “train for [both] music and survival.” Understandably, then, out of the thousands of movies he’s attended, it is Spielberg’s attempt to represent the Holocaust on film which becomes the object of Schneidermann’s obsession; he finds it utterly wanting, riddled with discontinuities, inaccuracies, and even outright gaffes, such as Spielberg’s hat reflected in glass. Cohen himself commits few missteps of his own in this formidable first novel, grappling with its weighty themes in language that soars with a virtuoso’s touch and intensity. --Tim Horvath

 

 

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