The Minimalist, by Kailee Pedersen
The Book
Synopsis:
For fans of Tár and The Piano Teacher, this gruesome and unsettling psychological drama is a darkly lucid portrait of a classical composer’s descent into madness.
As the last and greatest student of famed minimalist composer Ryder Wakefield, Mia Voss’s rise to prominence in the insular world of classical music has long been assured. When Ryder dies unexpectedly, she inherits everything—including the unfinished manuscript of his final composition, the mysterious Death Fugue: Music for Orchestra.
Haunted by memories of her tragic romance with Ryder’s late son, Oliver—like Mia, an Asian American adoptee—Mia leaves her girlfriend behind and returns to Ryder’s home to finish his last work. There, Mia is forced to confront her complex relationship with Ryder, who hid his Jewish and gay identities to become one of the most important twentieth-century American composers; her lingering guilt over Oliver’s suicide; and her own musical ambition as the manuscript begins to exert a disturbing, mesmerizing hold over her.
Drawn from the author’s own experiences as an adoptee and classical musician, The Minimalist is a harrowing examination of loss, torment, mental illness, self-harm, and artistic self-destruction.
My Review
The Minimalist is quite a unique book, a novel whose brilliance is difficult to capture in words, captivating the reader with what is a thorough analysis of the main character, dissecting her life while we deep dive into her experiences and how they shaped her, taking the opportunity to closely examine the nature of art and the artist, and showing a world full of bright moments but which hides the darker ones from the public such as classical music; all in a novel with a minimal plot.
A literary piece that follows closely Mia Voss, the last student of the minimalist composer Ryder Wakefield after his sudden death; she has inherited everything, including the unfinished manuscript of his final composition, Death Fugue: Music for Orchestra. As Mia takes the mantle of her mentor to finish it; a metaphorical journey in which Mia will reexamine her past, confronting her complicated relationship with Ryder and how she's still experiencing guilt over Oliver (Ryder's son) suicide, and her own ambition to complete a composition that is engulfing her, exerting a mesmerizing hold over her.
Pedersen soon turns the narration into Mia's character study, a slow dissection that goes in parallel with her descent into the darker parts of her psyche. We get to experience not only how she feels as an adoptee, but how the classical music world has been a cruel yet beautiful one; identity and its erasure in order to fit is one of the central themes of this book, as you can see it represented by the own characters, but also that obsessive strive for a perfection that drives many artists.
Through multiple timelines that are smartly woven together, we will get glimpses of how the canvas that was Mia was filled, how loss is crucial for her and the many conflicts that are still beguiling inside her.
The Minimalist takes its sweet time to lay all the pieces we need to understand what's passing by Mia's mind, a sort of slow burn that felt as the adequate pacing for this kind of novel.
The writing is gorgeous, with a use of prose that shows Pedersen's ability to create equally beautiful and disturbing images, definitely becoming unsettling at moments, but entrapping the reader as Mia was by Death Fugue.
Whatever I can say about The Minimalist will be rather short of its brilliance; it's not a novel for everybody, but it's the kind of proposal that will resonate with certain people, especially as you can feel how personal this was for Kailee Pedersen. An author who is in my auto-read list, and whose next book I can't wait to read!
The Author/s
Kailee Pedersen
Kailee Pedersen writes haunted, unsettling speculative fiction. She graduated with a B.A. in Classics from Columbia University, specializing in ancient Greek. Kailee was adopted from Nanning in 1996 and grew up in Nebraska, where her family owns a farm. Her writing on LGBTQ+ and Asian American themes was awarded an Artist Fellowship by the Nebraska Arts Council in 2015.
When not scribbling down her next book, you can catch her singing opera, playing video games, or working as a software engineer in New York City.
Her debut novel, SACRIFICIAL ANIMALS, is forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press (US) and Titan Books (UK). She is represented by Paul Lucas at Janklow & Nesbit.