Beautiful Inez: A Novel

By Bart Schneider

Book Overview

Inez Roseman, a noted beauty, has a charismatic husband, two bright children, and a successful career as a lead violinist with the San Francisco Symphony. On the surface, she is a woman with an... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400054427
• ISBN13: 9781400054428
• Release Date: February 2005
• Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books
• Length: 353 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.6" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

Exceptionally lovely!

It's not terribly difficult to understand why Mr. Schneider gets the characters and the setting remarkably right. I read this book shortly after it came out and a few days prior to hearing him speak. He is an intelligent and caring soul and this translates into his writing. I loved this book because it has believable characters and it's the kind of story that makes me ache. But perhaps my favorite part is he gets the relationship between Inez and Sylvia (friendship/lover) just right. You don't have to be a lesbian to realize the nuances between these two women are perfect pitch. This is the kind of book I sometimes carry around just because!

"The acrobatics of living. A way to stay alive"

Inez Roseman is a talented, comely lead violinist with the San Francisco Symphony. She's a stunning blonde, her hair brushed back with a silver comb at each temple, a square of silk between chin and violin. A high achiever, a dedicated wife and mother, Inez is also a beguiling mixture of the beautiful and the vulnerable. Lately, she seems to be drifting away from Jake, her charismatic husband, who works as a high profile San Francisco civil rights lawyer championing the cause on behalf of the Negroes, "a favorite of liberal columnists." The Rosemans appear to be the picture of privilege, talent, and good fortune, but both are living under a veil of illusion, where the words "love me" might as well be grace notes, the tidy embellishments in an overture that reveal little of what follows. For Jake is actually a charismatic philanderer who has been cheating on Inez with Christine, a wealthy, bored Pacific Heights society lady. Meanwhile, Inez has become preoccupied with thoughts of suicide. There's a dreaded heaviness existing over her life, the insidious curse that has made palpable her inability to feel anything save her separation from the world. Jake, of late, just can't understand Inez' moods, and the staggering depth of her melancholy and grief. When Inez meets Sylvia Bran, a waitress, showroom pianist, and self-confessed bohemian, Inez develops a severe and almost inexplicable attraction to her; "she's like a bride at forty surrendering to some unknown experience." And when Silvia comes to see Inez perform one night, she is instantly besotted with the dizzyingly beautiful violinist. Silvia's seduction is shockingly simple: basing her life on a series of lies, she masquerades as a journalist, first obtaining an interview with Inez, and than later seducing Inez at her rooms above the Hyde Street cable car line, "where the furnishings are a "blend of splintered wicker and discarded crates." Silvia is a self-confessed eccentric who has learned how to enjoy the smaller pleasures of life. She progressively beguiles Inez with exotic food, scented candles, the music of Ravel, and of course, sex. Inez is at first hesitant, but she allows herself to fall in love with this eccentric and captivating younger girl. Inez has been so emotionally and sexually shutdown, and so seriously melancholic that meeting Silvia unleashes something profound inside of her. Inez sees Silvia as sincere as anybody she's known aside from her own children. She'd even hand Silvia her heart of she could and be done with it, and she honestly tells her that "you didn't steal my heart; I gave it to you freely." But thoughts of suicide continue to haunt Inez, and it's as though her death wish seems inevitable. She feels she's coated with the weight of her own history. "A habit of abstraction. A habit of disassociation." Sylvia, for her part, is the language enthusiast whose obsession with words was inherited from her suicidal mother who "made a wall of language around herself

music and sensuality

An exciting and graceful novel engaging all your senses through music, wine, and eros. Schneider weaves his terrific knowledge of San Francisco, history of music, and remarkable people in a highly imaginative way, creating intrigues and suspense and erotic tension, so that despite the beautiful lyrical sentences (which are sometimes long but alwasy artfully wrapped up, like musical phrases in Beethoven), I read the novel anxiously, delighting in every turn of the events, and every strange detail--for example, a protagonist, blessed and afflicted with the perfect pitch, can't help himself but to analyze many sounds, assigning them C sharps, etc. I will reread the novel!