Events

Thursday 5/20/10  7:00pm-8:00pm Elise Blackwell reads from her novel An Unfinished Score While listening to the radio as she prepares dinner for her family, Suzanne learns that a jetliner has crashed with her lover, renowned orchestra conductor,  on board.  Suzanne, a concert violist, has long been unsatisfied with her marriage to a composer whose music turns emotion into thought.  Now she must grieve silently but as complex and difficult as that is, it pales in comparison with the arrival of Alex’s widow who blackmails her into completing the score for Alex’s unfinished viola concerto.   An artful novel of secrecy, vengeance, and regret, this psychologically compelling read explores the ways in which an artist’s personal and professional lives intersect, the nature of relationships among women as friends and competitors, and, finally, what it means to make a life of art. Elise Blackwell is the author of three previous novels:  Hunger, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish and Grub.  Her books have been chosen for numerous “best of the year” lists and each has been nominated as independent bookseller favorites.  Her short stories and cultural criticism have appeared in Witness, Topic, Seed, Global City Review, Quick Fiction and elsewhere.  Originally from southern Louisiana, she is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.   Excerpt from the opening of the book:   She hears the words on the radio. It is the radio that announces her lover's death. His is not a household name, not in most households, but he happens to be the most famous person on the plane that went down. The plane's wreckage, strewn across Indiana farmland, is being examined for clues. Crews search for the voice recorder, the black box that holds the secret of two hundred seventy-one deaths. Two hundred seventy, plus one.   Suzanne's rib cage shudders--a piano whose keys are struck all at once--yet she does not cry. She does not cry, but only closes her eyes and presses her palms flat on the cool counter. None of the facts of Alex's life suggests that it ends in a soybean field.   At the dining room table, playing a board game and separated from her by the counter on which she works, sit the other members of her household, a household in which Alex's name at least rings a bell. Her husband's dice clack against the wood; her best friend sighs as her game piece is sent back to start; Adele's hands clap three times.