The Silver Swan by Elena Delbanco

The Silver Swan by Elena Delbanco Other Press, 2015 ISBN-13: 978-1590517161 240 p.p.

Call me a sucker for historical fiction—you’re right, I completely am, it’s a long-legged blonde for me, I let it walk all over me. When I signed on to review The Silver Swan I initially thought I was getting into historical fiction: a Stradivarius instrument, a love triangle, a distant father you want the approval of? It has 18th century Italy written all over it. I thought I’d be disappointed in Swan when it was set in modern times—I didn’t know if a Strad would produce the same romantic longing and vicious betrayals that I imagined it would cause in a historical setting but I was pleasantly surprised. When I think of Stradivarius instruments I tend to think of violins—I wouldn’t be alone in this—but he also produced sublime cellos. One such cello, called the Silver Swan, is really the main character of our tale.

Loving an instrument is fickle because it seems like a person, music talks much the same way people do, and it can fill up a space—it can instigate violence, suggest romance, or incite rebellion. Music is universal; all cultures have it, all people understand it. I recently reviewed Bel Canto which played heavily with the themes of universality and communication. Music is a language all its own, and oddly The Silver Swan plays on miscommunication.

The central drama of the novel is that the priceless Stradivarius, the Silver Swan, should rightly go to Mariana after her father’s death but it opens by slighting her and giving the unique cello to his “musical heir” Claude. It is no surprise from the opening scenes of Mariana’s childhood that she is in constant competition with the Swan for her father’s love... and that she frequently falls short. Her father, Alexander, is truly a musician first and everything else is less important, and he values his daughter when she seems to possess a musical gift equal to his own. However, when Mariana stops playing, he loses interest in her. The next time he remembers to love Mariana he is old, infirm, and needs someone to take care of him—a task Mariana throws herself into with the abandon she used to throw into playing. She doesn’t care for her father out of love—it is out of desperation for his approval.

What I found so captivating in this novel was Mariana’s constant hope that she could discover the code that would crack into the safe of her father’s love but it is a fool’s task. Alexander Feldman is a man devoid of love—he is selfish, vain, and gives absolutely nothing back. Her naïve hope that this wasn’t the case was constantly fighting with her creeping suspicion that it was true. I found this battle hypnotizing, so much more so than her tumultuous relationship with Claude. Her father essentially becomes the Swan after his death, the Swan is the ultimate embodiment of her father: rare, cold and distant, something that will never embrace her and only demand her constant care and devotion.

This is Delbanco’s debut novel and she based it off her own father—a famous cellist with a Stradivarius. Delbanco claims to have been inspired by her fears about what would happen to her father’s Strad after his death which explains why Mariana’s relationship with her father feels so authentic. Many authors attempt to make a love-hate relationship between children and parents and side with love as the dominant emotion. With Mariana and Alexander it comes down to hate, to selfishness and disregard, which makes it juicier to read. However, I am a little unsettled about the biographical element as I gathered that there was an incestuous element to Mariana and Alexander’s relationship—something sinister in the need to possess, dominate, and love. Love is a word with poor definitions in this book—it gets conflated with lust, with ownership, with genius, with impersonality, with neglect, with abuse. Perhaps in the novel’s more predictable and even blasé elements is the love plot between Mariana, the scorned heir, and Claude, the victorious heir. Claude becomes a stand-in for Alexander which makes Mariana’s eagerness to sleep with him the more troubling (and reinforces my earlier, unconfirmed, suspicions that Mariana and Alexander have an incestuous sexual tension).

Honestly, I would have been happier with the novel if Claude wasn’t in it and Feldmann had left the Strad for charity because the cello isn’t actually present in the scene for most of the novel. The Strad is in the keep of experts in instrument maintenance—something that seems to introduce a potential theft plotline that Delbanco abandons (to my disappointment). For a freshman novel I think Delbanco was playing her cards conservatively but with the way she weaved intrigue and danger throughout Mariana’s character so effortlessly she didn’t have to—I would have been happy with a novel of only Mariana and Alexander. That being said, I was absorbing their parts of the book; I loved them. I want to see Delbanco pull on this particular thread some more... maybe another novel of Alexander’s life or another father-daughter pairing. She seems to have a truly eloquent way of phrasing that struggle that envelopes the reader and I’d love to see more from her.

***

Elena Delbanco taught at University of Michigan for 27 years before retiring and focusing on her writing—The Silver Swan is her debut novel. She founded the Bennington Writing Workshops with her husband, Nicholas Delbanco, a noted screenwriter. She has a unique perspective on classical music given that her father was the renowned cellist Bernard Greenhouse of the Beaux Arts Trio. He owned the Countess of Stainlein Stradivarius violoncello—a rare cello whose fate partially inspired The Silver Swan.