Sagasti narrates for us a thousand and one stories centre around music that take the reader from Bach to Gould, from Gould to the Beatles, from Sergeant Pepper to the music that was played in Nazi concentration camps, and so on.. But when do we end a story? When do we decide to sing the final lullaby?
Tracing a circular course that echoes Bach's Goldberg Variations, in Luis Sagasti's second book to appear in English he takes on the role of Scheherazade to recount us story after story, interwoven in subtle and surprising ways to create a tapestry that vibrates to celestial harmonies. He leads us on a journey from the music born of the sun to the music sent into space on the _Voyager _mission, from Rothko to rock music, from the composers of the concentration camps to a weeping room for Argentinian conscripts in the Falklands. _A Musical Offering _traverses the same shifting sands of fiction and history as the tales of Jorge Luis Borges, while also recalling the 'constellation' structure of Olga Tokarczuk's** **Flights. Filled with insight and ideas yet unexpectedly tender and personal, it is a celebration of storytelling, of childhood, and of the transformative power of music.
