Rating: 
Summary: Calculated Beauty
Review: This book has almost everything to become a highly successful novel. Based on short phrases, its amazing style, seemed unthinkable in the serious literature of post-Faulknerian age and appertained only to pulp fiction, is clear and efficacious in precise descriptions of nuances of human feelings and wee but important details. The story of Catherine McKenna, an Irish talanted pianist and composer, her struggle against 'a testosterone brigade' (masculine world) for independence in private life and art is an extremely advantageous theme nowadays. A process of musical creative work with its culs-de-sac, agonies and estasies is depicted thoroughly. Telling only about several crucial moments in the heroine's life (such as her father's funeral, a birth of her daughter, a breaking-off of distressing relations with her boyfriend-drunkard, a performance of her first orchestral composition) and masterly supplementing them with pertinent flashbacks, Bernard MacLaverty relates the story of every flesh: being a child with a genuine love to her parents and simultaneously with a hate for freedom restrictions; acquiring long-expected independence from them only to be held in servitude of passions and actualize worst parent's nightmares; becoming herself a mother with the doomed desire to save her own daughter from all evils and pains of the world.This novel was ill-starred: if it were published a year later, it could be awarded with the Booker Prize. But in 1997 it had to yield the Prize to A.Roy's wonderful book. 'Grace Notes' is a novel of calculated beauty (even an appearance of Protestant drums in Catherine's composition was anticipated), 'The God of Small Things' is a novel-flash overwhelming its readers with unpredictable gamut of human emotions.
Rating:
Summary: The notes between the notes
Review: This book is a short read, but not as easy at is seems at the first sight. Catherine McKenna is a young girl, an only child struggeling to be free from the bounds the her Northern Irish parents. She has a very special talent for music, and her music teacher from childhood becomes a very special person in her life. She teaches her to read the notes between the notes, the Grace Notes, and this gives special meaning to Catherine's life and music. And also special meaning to the book. The book can be read as words within words, which makes the book full of grace notes. What fascinates me most with the book is the way Bernard MacLaverty shows us how to read or look at music just like we read or look at paintings. Having read several books about the stories behind Vermeers painting, MacLaverty also uses a Vermeer painting to show music. I can fully agree with a the reviewer Tobias Hill from The Times: "The strongest impression left by Grace Notes is that of its central image-og the 'notes between the notes' which seem to compose themselves - of a life happening while it's heroine is busy making other plans...If architecture is frozen music, Grace Notes is the literary equivalnt, full of its own powerful rhythm. Britt Arnhild Lindland
Rating: 
Summary: Subtle and insightful.
Review: This book is not what it seems. First: the subject matter is gloomy: composer Catherine McKenna, recovering from a postnatal depression, is returning to violence stricken Northern Ireland for the funeral of her father. Not a glimmer of humour in sight. Seems depressing, but does not leave you depressed. I find that remarkable. Second: it may also seem a simple little book, with not much happening. But go to the trouble to read between the lines, and you will get a lot in return. Because grace notes are the unobtrusive notes that seemingly hardly have a function, but that in some subtle and undefinable way make a piece of music into something special. MacLaverty writes in this way. His book has the same effect that a beautiful piece music has: you can't tell exactly why, but you are deeply moved by it. What does happen in this novel is that Catherine must try to reconcile the Northern-Irish heritage she has tried to leave behind with the motherhood she can hardly cope with and reconcile both with her work. In the end it is the music that makes her whole again. In a beautiful finale we are shown the healing effect of art. Not a book for those who want a page-turner, but warmly recommended for those who like a deeply felt and subtle insight into a woman's soul. It is amazing that it was written by a man.
Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary Performance
Review: This is one of the most honest, well observed, multi-layered fictions I've read in a long time. It opens up the mind and heart of the creative artist and gets down the details of a woman's life in a sensitive, straightforward way. It tightly weaves setting, metaphors, rhythm and action. Just as the protagonist's inspiration comes first in rhythms, this books seems to have been born in the movement of the sea. The author has an interesting way of ordering his information: you learn to trust early into the book that if something hasn't been explained, the explanation will flow in at a later, more appropriate moment.
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully orchestrated, gracefully written.
Review: This multileveled novel tells of a young woman who escapes her Irish family, studies music with world class artists and composers, carves out a personal and professional life in a world dominated by men, and then returns briefly for the funeral of her estranged father and reconciliation with her mother. But it is also a search for grace in its various definitions. As a composer, Catherine looks for the "notes between the notes...graces, grace notes." A Catholic who no longer believes, she sees "music as the grace of God...a way of praying." Appalled by the cruelty and intolerance which "religious" men have shown each other throughout history, she believes that "her act of creation [not religious dogma]...define[s] her as an individual...and define[s] all individuals as important." She embarks on a series of religious compositions at the same time that she rejects the church and its teachings about marriage and family. Choosing not to marry the father of her child, she nevertheless recognizes her daughter as a miracle, a profound mystery which "there was no form of music to celebrate or mark..." Filled with symbols of Fatherhood, baptism, ascension, rebirth, and ultimate triumph, MacLaverty's Grace Notes is a compelling and sensitive exploration of a young woman's attempt to reconcile her humanity with the universal mysteries of creation.
Rating: 
Summary: A dull and very obligatory book about an interesting woman.
Review: With great expectations I began reading 'Grace Notes'. The first half of the book was very pleasing, interesting and gave much insight in family-relations dominated bij catholic creed and paternalistic upbringing. But the second half of the book, in which McLaverty glances back on the former adult life of the main character, is very boring and long-winded. Especially the scenes in the hospital about the birth of her child are no more than commonplace. I could not end the book and was very sorry for McLaverty whose Cal I loved very much. 'Grace Notes I found very overrated and not worth a Booker-nomination.
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