The Fiddler Is a Good Woman

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Pub Date 07 Nov 2017 | Archive Date 30 Sep 2017
Dundurn | Dundurn Press

Description

A biography that doesn’t quite exist, about a violinist who can’t be found, as told by people who don’t agree on much.

Novelist Geoff Berner has been tasked with writing a biography of DD, a mysterious, charismatic, chimerical musician who has, it seems, dropped off the face of the earth. In the course of his search for DD, Berner interviews her friends, ex-bandmates, ex-lovers, and others. They paint such variable portraits of her that each successive attempt to describe her casts doubt on the previous testimony. As his project is taken over by the lively, infuriating, entertaining tales, a wounded, gifted, and complex DD starts to emerge from all the eyewitness accounts and swear-to-God true stories.

Who is DD? Where did she go? And why didn’t that book get written? Travel through a world of knockabout musicians and chancers, on the trail of an inimitable artist who truly lives in the moment, for better or worse.
A biography that doesn’t quite exist, about a violinist who can’t be found, as told by people who don’t agree on much.

Novelist Geoff Berner has been tasked with writing a biography of DD, a...

A Note From the Publisher

Geoff Berner is the author of Festival Man and the graphic novel We Are Going To Bremen To Be Musicians. A singer-songwriter and accordion player, he has released six albums and toured in seventeen countries. He lives in Vancouver.

Geoff Berner is the author of Festival Man and the graphic novel We Are Going To Bremen To Be Musicians. A singer-songwriter and accordion player, he has released six albums and toured in seventeen...


Advance Praise

One of the most heartfelt lies I have ever read. Berner’s story of a punk-rock fiddler is by turns beguiling, unruly, and sad — an improbable oral history for an imaginary Canadian music scene.                                                            Sean Michaels, author of Us                                Conductors, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Berner’s unlikely, implausible sequel to Festival Man is somehow real — insofar as it appears to exist. It’s right here in front of you after all: full of desperate truth-tellers, truth-seekers in all their ragged glory, and the honest lies of oracles who’ve been banished to the edges of life. Whether or not it is true, however, is a whole other thing entirely. All I know for certain is The Fiddler is a Good Woman, and this is a wonderful book.                            Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, author of Down To This

One of the most heartfelt lies I have ever read. Berner’s story of a punk-rock fiddler is by turns beguiling, unruly, and sad — an improbable oral history for an imaginary Canadian music scene...


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Shelf Talkers

Book hashtag: #FiddlerIsAGoodWoman

ADVERTISING
Consumer ads: Walrus, The Georgia Straight
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Online ads: NetGalley...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781459737082
PRICE $18.99 (USD)
PAGES 232

Average rating from 14 members


Featured Reviews

Not set

“The Fiddler is a Good Woman,” by Geoff Berner, has a storyline of musicians and their environment. I get excited about the details of living that life. It’s not because I’m a doper, a groupie, or a dead head. It’s because I really like music and am enthralled by those who can skillfully perform it. This book is about a small collection of band musicians who perform country rock in small venues, traveling in meager circumstances, while burning out the candle. What a life.

Geoff Berner is, himself, of that ilk. He’s a singer/songwriter/accordionist who has caroused the world and is a careful observer of the crazy arena he inhabits. Berner has imagined a mysterious and talented woman violinist, DD, who is a sideman with whatever band she can tie up with, and who immediately transforms the group into a talented and cohesive assemblage whose music is instantly wildly received. The problems he outlines, her unpredictability, her unreliability, her personal hang-ups, and her inability to stay the course, are character flaws that threaten every relationship. Then she disappears, much to the consternation of those who depend on her talent to keep them working, flaws and all.

This is a novel into which the author has inserted himself, and it is he who searches for DD, trying to determine where she is and what she intends to do with her talent. To do so, he uses the recollections of the people closest to her, an odd group who don’t agree on most things. He constantly reminds the reader that the story is not true, although it seems to be non-fiction.

The story is loaded with blue language, sexual encounters between all sexes, hateful attitudes, jealousy, and personal instabilities. But there is also an undercurrent of musical resonance and performance that magically dumps the reader into smoky and whiskey-soaked second-rate music venues.

The characters in Berner’s novel are, in his words, “flawed, hurt people…making meaningful music.” That ambiance is reflected in his dislocated and rambling dialogue that, somehow, keeps the reader immersed in its legitimacy.

At the end, the author wants readers to evaluate his book as a piece of art, be it good, crappy, or middling. I’d call it good.

Not set
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