Maestro

‘The necessary elusiveness of perfection, the unplumbed ocean beneath articulateness, the ambivalence of beauty – these are the revolving concerns of Peter Goldsworthy, and handled not just with irony but with an effervescent, compassionate wit. He can’t help being funny, but he’s wise too.’ – Gerard Windsor, Australian Book Review

Against the backdrop of Darwin, that small, tropical hothouse of a port, half-outback, half-oriental, lying at the tip of northern Australia, a young and newly arrived southerner encounters the ‘maestro’, a Viennese refugee with a shadowed past. the occasion is a piano lesson, the first of many…