Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Rubens, Bernice (Vol. 31) - The New Yorker

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THE NEW YORKER

["Madame Sousatzka" is a] strange little story, set in London, about an eccentric piano teacher (famous for her Method) who polishes an amiable eleven-year-old prodigy's technique (he spends weekends at her Hyde Park house, which, despite its stylish address, is decaying) and then finds herself (along with her odd batch of boarders) loath to surrender him to success in the form of a crass, tin-eared impresario. This second novel by Bernice Rubens was first published in England in 1962; some of the nine novels that she has written since then—"Sunday Best," for example, and her most recent, "Birds of Passage"—are slier and more self-assured. Nevertheless, here are most of Miss Rubens' admirable hallmarks: a small cast, mostly of curious and quirky loners who know that silence is a form of speech …; regular reports on the daydreams into which they tend to drift; and a plot that starts out simple and then, twisted and split to make way for...

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