Liviu's Reviews > The Gradual

For once a highly expected novel which delivered.

First person narration from musician Sandro Sussken, native of the Glaund Republic, a military dictatorship on the Northern mainland in a permanent war with the Faianland Alliance, war that after a while moves into ritualized combat on the uninhabited Antarctic continent; but the world of the novel is the Dream Archipelago one (of The Affirmation, The Dream Archipelago collection, The Islanders and Adjacent - first and last here having dual action on Earth and there), where the huge, mysterious Archipelago, neutral, strange and protean occupies most of the world, while Glaund and Faiandland are side stories, so everything in the book ultimately relates to the Archipelago and its strangeness, while the action also mostly takes place there - some of the islands appear in the previous works which are useful to have at hand, especially The Dream Archipelago and The Islanders, though the story makes sense by itself -, some being new

Travelogue, meditation on life, fate and art, The Gradual unfolds slowly but builds tension from the first page, with the first paragraph, one for my collection of memorable openings (did a post on such on FBC a long time ago)

"I grew up in a world of music, in a time of war. The latter interfered with the former. After I became an adult, a composer, many pieces of my music were stolen, copied or rehashed by a plagiarist. I lost my brother, my wife and my parents, I became a criminal and a fugitive, I traveled among islands, I discovered the gradual. Everything affected everything else, but music was the balm, the constant.

When I went in pursuit of my tormentor, I became an inadvertent traveler in time.

Time is a gradual process – like ageing, you do not notice it happening."

Obsessed by the nearby three islands of the coast of Glaund, islands that are mysterious and forbidden, Sandro grows up with music as his main focus in life through which the constant horrors of war are kept at bay - later when the situation normalizes and the war moves far away as noted, he manages to befriend an Archipelago musician and use his growing reputation to finally travel there, only for strangeness to engulf him; and then the book really starts and it keeps moving till the ambiguous but superb ending.

Wonderful, beautifully written and impossible to put down once started, The Gradual delivered big time on my huge expectations and I highly recommend it, while noting that The Dream Archipelago and The Islanders make excellent companion pieces though are independent of the book