![]() I'm always a sucker for novels with music in them in some way. I loved this book! I came across it by accident but was surprised I hadn't heard of it, seeing as it won the Giller Prize in 2014. Sometimes it is like this, listening to music: the steady bars let you separate from your body, slip your skin, and you are standing before the shuttering slides of memory." Us Conductors is steeped in beauty, wonder, and looping heartbreak, a sublime debut that inhabits the idea of invention on every level. Throughout all this, his love for Clara remains constant and unflagging, traveling through the ether much like a theremin’s notes. In the second half, the novel builds to a crescendo as Termen returns to Russia, where he is imprisoned in a Siberian gulag and later brought to Moscow, tasked with eavesdropping on Stalin himself. In the United States he makes a name for himself teaching the theremin to eager music students and marketing his inventions to American companies. ![]() In the first half of the book, we learn of Termen’s early days as a scientist in Leningrad during the Bolshevik Revolution, the acclaim he receives as the inventor of the theremin, and his arrival in 1930s New York under the aegis of the Russian state. ![]() In a finely woven series of flashbacks and correspondence, Lev Termen, the Russian scientist, inventor, and spy, tells the story of his life to his “one true love,” Clara Rockmore, the finest theremin player in the world. Winner of the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize. ![]()
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