Were this a less good book than it is, it would be called How Bach Can Help You Grieve. As it is, Counterpoint serves very well, describing the American art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott’s intertwined themes: his reaction to the death of his mother, with whom he had a fractious and traumatic relationship, and his attempt to learn Bach’s Goldberg Variations, through which he considers the ability of the greatest music to ease us out of a senseless pit of grief.
This is a deeply serious and often affecting book, combining the ‘grief memoir’ with the genre created by Alan Rusbridger in Play It Again, an account of an amateur pianist learning Chopin’s Ballade No. 1. Kennicott’s two strands, of memory and music, become the first and second subjects of a book in sonata form, developed and recapitulated into a satisfying whole. He has written a voyage around his wounded and wounding mother, by way of an aria and 30 variations.
Kennicott has written a voyage round his wounded and wounding mother, by way of an aria and 30 variations
Kennicott’s mother, he concedes, was never an alcoholic, never uncontrollably violent, never mentally unstable.
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