The Garden Where the Brass Band Played

By Simon Vestdijk and Simon Vestidijk

Book Overview

The book is a coming-of-age novel, something that in other languages is expressed more pointedly as the novel of education. Nol, "the judge's son, ' is the person whose moral sentiments are being educated. But that education is acquired at the expense of an infinitely more valuable person, the young woman Nol loves, who has been exploited by men of weight and standing in their provincial community-all of them human, disgracefully human.
Not tells the story from the time he was five years old, when, inspired by a rendition of one of Souza's marches in the garden where the brass band played, he danced with the conductor's daughter, taller and older than himself, before a bemused assemblage of adults. The web of incident and reflection in Nol's narration astonishes the reader with the texture of the lives it evokes, ending with Nol's small, crucial defection that precipitates tragedy. In The Garden Where the Brass Band Played, as with every real novel of the genre, it is the reader whose sentiments are educated, by the pain of it, and no doubt rather too late.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 094153359X
• ISBN13: 9780941533591
• Release Date: April 1998
• Publisher: New Amsterdam Books
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.1" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Vestdijk at his best

This novel is regarded as one of Dutch writer Simon Vestdijk's best novels ever. Well, there are a couple of arguments supporting this view. The novel is beautifully written and the story is carefully created. Vestdijk transforms his memories of his own youth into the memories that everybode can identify with. The original title De Koperen Tuin, which means The Garden of Copper, gives even more meaning to the story and the way memory and the past play their different roles in the novel. This book is brilliant and everybody should at least try to read it!

one of the finest love stories of this century

"Whereas The Garden where the Brass Band Played is `merely' one of the finest love stories written in this century, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most beautiful novels ever written." With this quotation in mind,one should seek out this fine Dutch novel about the love affair between a young man of the upper middle class and the daughter of a failing music teacher.