By Joshua Cohen
Fugue State Press, 2007, 380 pp., $18 (paperback)
It’s no accident that Joshua Cohen’s debut novel, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, comes packaged in a guise of Schirmer sheet music so exact that it will cause musicians to do double-takes, wondering why they’ve never heard of this Schneidermann fellow. Cohen himself delivers the performance within, a sprawling 380-page verbal onslaught, all of which purports to be occurring on-stage at Carnegie Hall over a single night. Readers who insist on what John Gardner called fiction’s “continuous waking dream” will squirm in their seats and concoct excuses to slip out during intermission, never to return. But those who stick around to take in Cohen’s bravura production in its entirety will find themselves amply rewarded--dazzled by Cohen’s language, his knowledge of music and history, and most of all the sheer chutzpah of his prose.
In lieu of an unbroken dream, what we get is akin to the restless, late-night perambulations of an insomniac sifting through his life, the back-and-forth motion of text across the page recalling a violinist’s bowing. The source of this soliloquy is a man named Laster, himself a violinist and Schneidermann’s protégé. Laster pays homage to his teacher and father-figure, who has utterly vanished after walking out of a matinee of Schindler’s List three weeks prior. The character of Schneidermann is inherently fascinating, worthy of this epic treatment: steeped in the knowledge of music and philosophy, he opines, for instance, that Mozart is “an inferior imitation of God,” and deems Late Van Beethoven an entity distinct from and decidedly lesser than the better-known Ludwig.