Nat K's Reviews > August Blue

Apparently we all have a doppelgänger* somewhere in the world. Someone whose likeness is so uncanny, that you can be mistaken for one another. Elsa M. Anderson crosses paths with hers in a flea market in Athens. It’s the end of the summer, and there’s already a slight chill in the air. Elsa is at a stall filled with plaster statues of gods and goddesses and sees further along there is a man selling two mechanical dancing horses. Which Elsa decides she desperately wants to buy, but her doppelgänger beats her to it. As if the purchase is made out of spite.

”I felt she had stolen something from me, something I would miss in my life.”

Paris, London, Sardinia. We follow Elsa on her travels as a music tutor for recalcitrant teenagers with little interest in the piano lessons she is teaching. Despite the fact that Elsa is a world renowned pianist, now reduced to earning meager pickings after having a spectacular meltdown onstage in Vienna, whilst performing a Rachmaninov concerto.

This is told in the first person, with Elsa as the narrator.

It’s a book filled with existential angst, where you can't help but think the characters are having a bit too much pity for themselves. But this is also what makes them interesting. As they feel too much, and music as Art takes over their world, and in the case of Elsa, her identity crisis after years of being encaged as a child prodigy through to a talented performer questioning who she was. Her exterior colouring of her long brunette hair a vibrant shade of blue, to mirror the emotions bubbling inside.

For Elsa was adopted at birth, and then at the age of six, her foster parents handed her over to the great musical genius Arthur Goldstein, who knew even then that her hands held magic in them.

As we criss cross countries and friends and lovers, Elsa spots her doppelgänger in various settings. Usually just a glimpse, within finger’s reach…Will the two ever actually meet?

This is such a beautiful book about identity and falling apart. About memories and what can trigger them. Set in the middle of the recent pandemic, it’s quite discomfiting to be reading of the restrictions of “life in lockdown” and mask wearing. It’s almost surreal to think we lived through that. And no, it’s not a focus of the novel at all. It’s simply mentioned in parts.

And yes, you will discover why the dancing mechanical horses held such special meaning for Elsa. It’s interesting to me that this is the second book I’ve read this year featuring horses in it, the other being the sensational The Earth Spinner by Anuradha Roy. Horses, doppelgängers, what can it all mean?

I read this in one sitting, which hasn’t happened for a long time. The flowy, dreamlike quality of the story had me turning page after page. It was the perfect long weekend Monday read, sitting under the lemon tree with our tabby princess.

Reading this was like watching a stylish black and white French movie from the 1960s. Sublime. A standout for me as this year is slowly and yet so quickly drawing to an end.

* I couldn’t help but think of the hilarious doppelgänger scene in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. It’s not something you read about all that often.

”We should never overestimate a person’s strength just because it suits us to do so, she said.”