The book was boring and just not as gripping as I thought it would be.

It was very difficult to get into this book. Even with a historical frame of reference, speaking Spanish and basic Catalan, and having lived in Barcelona for 18 months and traveled much of the rest of Spain...this book was still difficult to stick with. After about page 300 it gets really interesting and the author does a nice job of telling a good story while maintaining fidelity to the history. Decent historical-fiction.

The novel follows the fictitious cellist Feliu Delargo from his birth in a Catalan village in 1892 to the concert halls of Europe in the early 20th century and finally to the train depot in a small French port city in October 1940. The novel explores the conflict between art and conscience; should those in the public eye use their art and celebrity to advance a particular cause, to warn the populace, or to numb the masses? This is a large topic to tackle and the book covers a significant time frame where wars, disease and economic depressions taxed even the strongest and wealthiest. Romano-Lax manages this very well. The story pulled me in and kept me turning pages. When I got to the end, I found myself wishing the book were longer.