PositiveThe Financial TimesCultural historian Eric Beck Rubin’s debut novel is an elegant synaesthetic tale in which memories of past loves and lost innocence are narrated alongside soundscapes of [protagonist Jan] de Vries’s musical repertoire. The title, we learn, refers to a piano training score by 19th-century Austrian composer Carl Czerny, whose experiments in tempo reflect the movement of Rubin’s book as it hurtles towards its bittersweet ending. De Vries’s final confrontation with Dirk is a tragic, Gatsby-like meditation on the impossibility of reliving the past, however much we cling to our memories.
