The Song Beneath the Ice

Fiorito's first book, "The Closer We are to Dying" was a critically acclaimed memoir, praised for its directness and storytelling power. In the novel "The Song Beneath the Ice", the same skill and nuance preside in a unique, brilliant virtuoso performance. And performance is central to this story--as an artist's lifeblood, terror and ultimate healing. Domenic Amouruso is a concert pianist, haunted by his place in his artistic community and in the history of the concert pianist. The story unfolds through transcriptions of tape recordings made by Amouruso, heard a year after his sudden mid-performance disappearance. Ultimate comparisons to Glenn Gould are inevitable, both by Amouruso himself in his tape-recorded musings, and by the reader. Gould, universally acclaimed as one of the great concert pianists, renounced public performance for the recording studio and radio and television documentaries. His documentary, The Idea of North, streamed conversations and background sound in the manner of a fugue. As a thinker and composer, Gould craved the North's solitude, silence, beauty and bleakness for its purity and lack of distractions. Ultimately though, this was a romantic ideal for Gould. His fear of cold weather prevented him from experiencing the North's reality. Amouruso's reality is the Toronto classical music scene. He reeks of it. He craves and is dependent on its approval. But his need for its approval frustrates and imprisons him. Struggling in the insecurity of his artistic and personal lives, he escapes; disappearing to Baffin Island. He eventually sends to his friend, newspaper reporter Joe Serafino, the tape recordings that comprise this story. At times, the transcriptions seem like a prelude to what will be the ultimate conventional novel that might emerge. That is what is unique here. The transcripts, interspersed with short conversations between Serafino and others, comprise the entire book. Eventually the story had me reminding myself which was my own life, and which were Amouruso's and Serafino's lives. That's how good this is--you eventually feel as if you are both listening to and deciphering the transcripts yourself and swept up into Amouruso's secluded life. Amouruso is both clever and insecure. He muses "Music is a clipped hedge in the ground of an asylum. It provides a refuge; It is an ordered, bordered beauty. And I am a gardener. I work according to the rhythm of my shears. As I clip, I hear the howls of the inmates. They are the crying of the leaves." On hearing this, Serafino notes "If this were a book, you'd mark that passage and dog-ear the page." Fiorito is brilliant, using Serafino to make an editorial comment on his own written passage!Amouruso's and Fiorito's friends and colleagues emerge here and there. Fiorito's strength as a writer has us knowing and understanding them in a few sentences. But also, together they give us insight into the life of an artist and the arts community that both supports and constricts him