The Great Concert of the Night

/ Jonathan Buckley

A nearly plotless yearlong account of grief, in diary form. (Three things I love in a book: plotlessness, grief, and diaries.) The protagonist, a curator at a regional museum of oddities in southern England, has lost his love to cancer. Over the course of a year, he reconstructs parts of their relationship, muses on his preceding marriage, meanders through philosophy and history, contemplates jealousy, deepens his friendship with a vagabond, faces precarious employment, mourns. Imogen, the lost love, was a film actress, and a great deal of the book is devoted to watching her in films or remembering watching them or hearing about the details of their filming. All of this sounds dreadfully boring, and yet. The world Buckley constructs is so real you forget it’s fiction. The diary form lends an intimacy and sense of unpredictability. And the writing is smart and nuanced. I can’t remember the last time I felt so favorably disposed toward an older male narrator.

This book made me think of Julian Barnes’s Before She Met Me, which I remember loving in my 20s. That one’s about sexual jealousy — a middle-aged professor falls for a younger woman who acted in a few bad films; their relationship is going fine until he watches the films and starts to unravel. I probably loved it because it could be read as a horror story about the male gaze, and Barnes was funny. Buckley’s book has many amusing moments too (the narrator is particularly incisive when judging his ex-wife’s self-help-y new wife), but it is above all a chronicle of the year in the life of a sad person, and it’s very affecting.

—Nina Renata-Aron/ Reviewed January 2020

January 14, 2020 / New York Review Books / 
304 PAGES