The word “crooked” in the title of this novel, the first in a series of seven, only partially describes it. There is much that is crooked about the plot, characters, settings, themes, and the writing style, in the sense of them not being straightforward, or being divergent from the norm. But this is highly consistent crookedness, from the first page to the last, and, after thinking about it, I concluded that Sophia Lambton intentionally did this to suit her subject matter, the characters and the medium. The Crooked Little Pieces, Vol. I, is anything but customary and genre-driven. If you want to read an easy, normal novel, this one is not for you. If you want to be challenged, and delve into the crookedness, give it a go.
The Crooked Little Pieces, Volume 1 – A Novel, by Sophia Lambton (Literary Fiction, Art Novel, Publisher: The Crepuscular Press, Great Britain, May 11, 2022, paperback, 448 pages)
While there are many sub-plots, themes and sub-texts, the narrative primarily focuses on the two protagonists, twin girls, who are, as sometimes happens with twins, opposites in character and skills. “Anneliese van der Holt” is the analytical, reserved one. “Isabel can der Holt” is the precocious music prodigy who is outgoing to the point of suffering from emotional lability.
The first part of the story takes them from 1925, when they are six years old, in Zurich, to the outbreak of World War I in England. Isabel has a talent for playing the cello, which she learns to play by herself as a six-year-old, as well as for the piano. But her emotions are so intense and uncontrolled that she drops out of her career path as a musician. In stead, she discovers eroticism and, eventually, sadism. Anneliese, on the other hand, has a forensic mind and ends up studying medicine. But she is a loner and can barely tolerate other human beings, other than her sister, her father, and her very peculiar, and mysterious, therapist.
Underlying the plot centred around the growing up of these two characters, who are each somewhat crooked and broken into little pieces, are the themes of music and musicality, female liberation and women’s rights, women in medicine and Psychiatry, women as professional musicians, women as thinkers rather than child-bearers, women as patients meant for an insane asylum from the outset (their mother), and many more.
About many things, mostly music
The dominant theme in this first novel in the septology is music – the practice of it, and living with it, and living without it. Lambton writes her best prose when she writes about music. She is, after all, a classical music critic in real life. When she writes about how Isabel perceives and experiences music you immediately sense the accuracy and realism in her prose:
“Isabel remarked that they were both so calm – even too tranquil. Here was Chopin’s Ballade No. 1: a tempest of clamouring furore; a gallery of bitter recognition, feral strife and enforced torpor. The piece resounded in her head as she inspected the beige wall before her. On it hung some innocent replica of an oil-painted vase. Crickets were chirping outside. These small black dots in front of her she shared with Chopin: a transmission to her from the long-dead master. No instrumentalist could lavish craft onto a piece if lacking the capacity to conjure the creator’s feelings at the time of composition.”
Sophia Lambton, The Crooked Little Pieces, Vol. 1, p. 134
The passage refers to “Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23” for solo piano by Frédéric Chopin. Completed in 1835, it is one of Chopin’s greatest and most popular works. When you hear it, you will probably recognize the hauntingly beautiful main theme. But what stuck with me is the line: “No instrumentalist could lavish craft onto a piece if lacking the capacity to conjure the creator’s feelings at the time of composition.” So true, that. And beautifully expressed.
Like many ideas in the novel, this one is profound. And the more I read up about it, the more I realized that she is intentionally addressing a complex and important principle in music. She expects you, the reader, to pause and think. This explains why Isabel is such a tangle of emotions, and why she cannot get herself to perform music to others, preferring to keep the experience to herself.
Overwhelming words
To quote her profile on operawire.com, Lambton became a professional classical music critic at the age of seventeen when she began to be published in “Musical Opinion”, Britain’s oldest magazine centred on classical music. In 2015 she graduated from Oxford with a degree in Classics and Modern Languages. She has contributed to The Guardian, Bachtrack, musicOMH, BroadwayWorld, BBC Music Magazine and OperaWire. She has conducted operatic research around the world for The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography, which will be published to coincide with Callas’ one hundredth birthday in December 2023.
Lambton’s music reviews are a balance between technical analyses of technique, and judgment on the expressiveness and effectiveness of the performances. They are precisely worded, objective discourses. Considering what she is reviewing, they are surprisingly short, sharp and to the point.
This is not how she writes in this novel. This is an avalanche of words. It is like being inside a Baroque or Rococo-style painting with a riot of colours, detail, frills and furbelows, quirks and curlicues.
I have always thought that my English is good and that my vocabulary is larger than that of most other people. But in this novel, I saw words I’ve never seen or used, and metaphors and comparisons that are irregular and not idiomatic. (For a nitpicking grammar maniac like me, this was very hard to ignore.)
So the question is why Lambton wrote it like this, because by doing so, she runs the risk of some readers not understanding or relating to her story. But I thought again about the enduring problem of depicting music in words.
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture…”
When writing about experiencing and performing music, the author’s only tool is the decidedly basic business of prose, and as David Mitchell explains:
“‘Really great novels about music, about the music scene… there are not many at all.’ To write about music is ‘this impossible thing,’ he says. ‘There is that famous quote, that’s now pretty much a cliché, writing about music is like dancing about architecture. And they are in some ways opposites. ‘Prose isn’t that good at describing music. After three or four sentences it becomes as intolerable as listening to someone else’s dreams.'”
Many people say that this quote about music originally comes from Thelonius Monk. Others claim that it comes from a comment by Elvis Costello in a 1983 interview, who said; “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture – it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.”
It may be a stupid and very difficult thing to do, but nevertheless, people do it, with varying degrees of success.
The form, literally, of the art, means that you, as an author, have to combine descriptions of two types of sensory inputs: visual and auditory. The result will always be complex and surreal – much like “listening to someone else’s dreams”.
This is probably why Lambton wrote in this particular style, at least to deal with the music aspects of the plot and the characters. Notwithstanding that Anneliese is scientific rather than artistic, the stream of words depicts their dreams, their inner voices, their psychedelic-coloured, unrestrained, raw streams of consciousness. In other words, her writing style suits the medium, the themes, and the characters.
Immersive experience
You do not so much read this novel, as allow it to overwhelm you, so that you sink into the words, and are left with an odd urge to go and listen to Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, and a few other pieces that are mentioned in the book.
I have read many authors whose writing styles are not simple and sparse, and who rarely write sentences without adjectives or metaphors, so that they read like prose poetry. It works, so long as it suits the subject and the narrative.
If readers, like me, can cope with this writing style, then what remains? You want to know what happens to the characters. You care about how it ends. You have felt and perceived what the author wants you to experience. That is the ultimate intention of any work of fiction. Otherwise, why do you write it? You may as well stick your book in a box in a vault and leave it unopened for the next 100 years.
Finally
Did I care about the twins, their doting father, their hidden, insane, mother, and their peculiar obsessions? To a certain extent, yes. It took me almost a year to finish reading it, what with many other things on my plate that got in the way. And the reason I kept at it, a few pages at a time, is because it is such a very strange story, and because I felt there was the potential of something important happening as the narrative evolves: the coming-of-age story about twins could turn into a notable Künstlerroman. Perhaps it will happen in the next two novels, The Crooked Little Pieces Vol. II and The Crooked Little Pieces Vol III.
Vol. 1 sat there on my desk, waiting to be opened like Pandora’s box, to release all the words in the world. Read it, if for no other reason than that it is unlikely that you’ll ever come across anything else quite like this.
SEVEN CIRCUMSTANCES 
The word “crooked” in the title of this novel, the first in a series of seven, only partially describes it. There is much that is crooked about the plot, characters, settings, themes, and the writing style, in the sense of them not being straightforward, or being divergent from the norm. But this is highly consistent crookedness, from the first page to the last, and, after thinking about it, I concluded that Sophia Lambton intentionally did this to suit her subject matter, the characters and the medium. The Crooked Little Pieces, Vol. I, is anything but customary and genre-driven. If you want to read an easy, normal novel, this one is not for you. If you want to be challenged, and delve into the crookedness, give it a go.
While there are many sub-plots, themes and sub-texts, the narrative primarily focuses on the two protagonists, twin girls, who are, as sometimes happens with twins, opposites in character and skills. “Anneliese van der Holt” is the analytical, reserved one. “Isabel can der Holt” is the precocious music prodigy who is outgoing to the point of suffering from emotional lability.
The first part of the story takes them from 1925, when they are six years old, in Zurich, to the outbreak of World War I in England. Isabel has a talent for playing the cello, which she learns to play by herself as a six-year-old, as well as for the piano. But her emotions are so intense and uncontrolled that she drops out of her career path as a musician. In stead, she discovers eroticism and, eventually, sadism. Anneliese, on the other hand, has a forensic mind and ends up studying medicine. But she is a loner and can barely tolerate other human beings, other than her sister, her father, and her very peculiar, and mysterious, therapist.
Underlying the plot centred around the growing up of these two characters, who are each somewhat crooked and broken into little pieces, are the themes of music and musicality, female liberation and women’s rights, women in medicine and Psychiatry, women as professional musicians, women as thinkers rather than child-bearers, women as patients meant for an insane asylum from the outset (their mother), and many more.
About many things, mostly music
The dominant theme in this first novel in the septology is music – the practice of it, and living with it, and living without it. Lambton writes her best prose when she writes about music. She is, after all, a classical music critic in real life. When she writes about how Isabel perceives and experiences music you immediately sense the accuracy and realism in her prose:
“Isabel remarked that they were both so calm – even too tranquil. Here was Chopin’s Ballade No. 1: a tempest of clamouring furore; a gallery of bitter recognition, feral strife and enforced torpor. The piece resounded in her head as she inspected the beige wall before her. On it hung some innocent replica of an oil-painted vase. Crickets were chirping outside. These small black dots in front of her she shared with Chopin: a transmission to her from the long-dead master. No instrumentalist could lavish craft onto a piece if lacking the capacity to conjure the creator’s feelings at the time of composition.”
Sophia Lambton, The Crooked Little Pieces, Vol. 1, p. 134
The passage refers to “Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23” for solo piano by Frédéric Chopin. Completed in 1835, it is one of Chopin’s greatest and most popular works. When you hear it, you will probably recognize the hauntingly beautiful main theme. But what stuck with me is the line: “No instrumentalist could lavish craft onto a piece if lacking the capacity to conjure the creator’s feelings at the time of composition.” So true, that. And beautifully expressed.
Like many ideas in the novel, this one is profound. And the more I read up about it, the more I realized that she is intentionally addressing a complex and important principle in music. She expects you, the reader, to pause and think. This explains why Isabel is such a tangle of emotions, and why she cannot get herself to perform music to others, preferring to keep the experience to herself.
Overwhelming words
To quote her profile on operawire.com, Lambton became a professional classical music critic at the age of seventeen when she began to be published in “Musical Opinion”, Britain’s oldest magazine centred on classical music. In 2015 she graduated from Oxford with a degree in Classics and Modern Languages. She has contributed to The Guardian, Bachtrack, musicOMH, BroadwayWorld, BBC Music Magazine and OperaWire. She has conducted operatic research around the world for The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography, which will be published to coincide with Callas’ one hundredth birthday in December 2023.
Lambton’s music reviews are a balance between technical analyses of technique, and judgment on the expressiveness and effectiveness of the performances. They are precisely worded, objective discourses. Considering what she is reviewing, they are surprisingly short, sharp and to the point.
This is not how she writes in this novel. This is an avalanche of words. It is like being inside a Baroque or Rococo-style painting with a riot of colours, detail, frills and furbelows, quirks and curlicues.
I have always thought that my English is good and that my vocabulary is larger than that of most other people. But in this novel, I saw words I’ve never seen or used, and metaphors and comparisons that are irregular and not idiomatic. (For a nitpicking grammar maniac like me, this was very hard to ignore.)
So the question is why Lambton wrote it like this, because by doing so, she runs the risk of some readers not understanding or relating to her story. But I thought again about the enduring problem of depicting music in words.
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture…”
When writing about experiencing and performing music, the author’s only tool is the decidedly basic business of prose, and as David Mitchell explains:
Many people say that this quote about music originally comes from Thelonius Monk. Others claim that it comes from a comment by Elvis Costello in a 1983 interview, who said; “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture – it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.”
It may be a stupid and very difficult thing to do, but nevertheless, people do it, with varying degrees of success.
The form, literally, of the art, means that you, as an author, have to combine descriptions of two types of sensory inputs: visual and auditory. The result will always be complex and surreal – much like “listening to someone else’s dreams”.
This is probably why Lambton wrote in this particular style, at least to deal with the music aspects of the plot and the characters. Notwithstanding that Anneliese is scientific rather than artistic, the stream of words depicts their dreams, their inner voices, their psychedelic-coloured, unrestrained, raw streams of consciousness. In other words, her writing style suits the medium, the themes, and the characters.
Immersive experience
You do not so much read this novel, as allow it to overwhelm you, so that you sink into the words, and are left with an odd urge to go and listen to Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, and a few other pieces that are mentioned in the book.
I have read many authors whose writing styles are not simple and sparse, and who rarely write sentences without adjectives or metaphors, so that they read like prose poetry. It works, so long as it suits the subject and the narrative.
If readers, like me, can cope with this writing style, then what remains? You want to know what happens to the characters. You care about how it ends. You have felt and perceived what the author wants you to experience. That is the ultimate intention of any work of fiction. Otherwise, why do you write it? You may as well stick your book in a box in a vault and leave it unopened for the next 100 years.
Finally
Did I care about the twins, their doting father, their hidden, insane, mother, and their peculiar obsessions? To a certain extent, yes. It took me almost a year to finish reading it, what with many other things on my plate that got in the way. And the reason I kept at it, a few pages at a time, is because it is such a very strange story, and because I felt there was the potential of something important happening as the narrative evolves: the coming-of-age story about twins could turn into a notable Künstlerroman. Perhaps it will happen in the next two novels, The Crooked Little Pieces Vol. II and The Crooked Little Pieces Vol III.
Vol. 1 sat there on my desk, waiting to be opened like Pandora’s box, to release all the words in the world. Read it, if for no other reason than that it is unlikely that you’ll ever come across anything else quite like this.
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