Plot Summary
The book centers around the postpartum depression of its female protagonist, Catherine McKenna, a Northern Irish music teacher and composer living in Scotland. She faces preparations for her father's funeral, endures disturbing visions regarding her recently born daughter, Anna, and suffers restrictions imposed by the Catholic Church on her family and her childhood. She engages her depression through the cathartic and intuitive composition of music; later in the book, she begins to craft a master symphony. The novel ends with a powerful live radio broadcast of her symphony.
The title is an explicit reference to grace notes, which a character in the novel terms as "the notes between the notes". The redeeming power of art is indeed a prominent theme. In addition, critics have considered the concept of fleeting and minute musical notes as descriptive of the novel's style (Donath).
Read more about this topic: Grace Notes
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or summary:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)