books
It’s not often that a piece of writing strikes me as exceptional. But when I do I always mark it the text I am reading and commit the crime of folding over the corner of the page. A piece of writing has to be particularly fine if I then go the length of carrying the book with me to read out to people (anyone who will listen actually) and off the scale if I take the final step and type it up to circulate to those outside my immediate reach. Well, that is what happened with half a page of text in Michael Wright’s C’est La Folie.
In fact, I had never even heard of this book and it was only because I found it in the book bank on the stairs of discarded reading material left behind by previous holiday makers in Kefalonia last month that I discovered it at all. But, specialising as I do in teaching people how to write their life story I am always on the look out for travel memoir.
In a nutshell: Michael moves to France alone. He buys a completely ramshackle farm that he claims is called La Folie (madness) and desperately waits for it to be renovated so he can bring over his beloved grand piano. It is when the agony of being without it starts to get to him that he writes the following:
April: the Lone Pine
“So here I am, in front of my piano. I can picture the keyboard’s white and black gleam; the burnished strings stretching away from me, reflected in the polished lacquer of the open lid.
In my head, the first thing I play is a simple chord, with both hands. The weight of the notes is like the give of the sand beneath my feet as I walk along a beach with someone for whom I have always longed. We are in E-flat major; my favourite key, the key of all that’s good in the world. Every key evokes a different mood: A major for summer pleasures, G-flat major for heartfelt longing, C minor for sadness you can describe, C-sharp minor for sadness you can’t, G major for a trusted friend, B minor they should ever let you down.
E-flat major is the sound of my mum’s lasagne, the sound of the twilight on a clear summer’s day, the sound of the Espace when it starts and I’m not expecting it to, because I’m late for playing the organ for Mass. It is the key of Chopin’s most beautiful nocturnes and waltzes, three-quarters of Mozart’s horn concertos, of ‘Spread a Little Happiness’ and ‘Someone to Watch Over Me.’
An octave in the left hand. The right hand, playing the first inversion in that tenor range where the piano sings most plangently.
Play both hands together, and we are at home, there are lights in all the windows, two dogs sleeping in front of the fire, and I have somehow invented myself a gorgeous wife who is, even as the notes die, mixing me the perfect gin-and-tonic.
That’s how it feels to play an E-flat major chord, when you don’t have a piano.”
Wonderful, isn’t it? I guess the rarity of my discovery is proven further by the fact that I am now in email contact with Michael, have his permission to reproduce his extract, have bought the sequel to C’est La Folie (called Je t’aime a La Folie) and will be posting an interview with him shortly.
Watch this space and meanwhile, tell me what you thought of the extract, above.
Michael Wright’s books are published by Transworld. His website is www.lafolie.co.uk
