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The Magic Keys

Name: The Magic Keys
Author: Albert Murray
ISBN: 9781400095537

by Albert Murray

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Overview

If Gabriel Garc’a M‡rquez had chosen to write about Pakistani immigrants in England, he might have produced a novel as beautiful and devastating as Maps for Lost Lovers. Jugnu and Chanda have disappeared. Like thousands of people all over Enland, they were lovers and living together out of wedlock. To Chanda’s family, however, the disgrace was unforgivable. Perhaps enough so as to warrant murder.As he explores the disappearance and its aftermath through the eyes of Jugnu’s worldly older brother, Shamas, and his devout wife, Kaukab, Nadeem Aslam creates a closely observed and affecting portrait of people whose traditions threaten to bury them alive. The result is a tour de force, intimate, affecting, tragic and suspenseful.

Synopsis

If Gabriel Garc’a M‡rquez had chosen to write about Pakistani immigrants in England, he might have produced a novel as beautiful and devastating as Maps for Lost Lovers. Jugnu and Chanda have disappeared. Like thousands of people all over Enland, they were lovers and living together out of wedlock. To Chanda’s family, however, the disgrace was unforgivable. Perhaps enough so as to warrant murder.

As he explores the disappearance and its aftermath through the eyes of Jugnu’s worldly older brother, Shamas, and his devout wife, Kaukab, Nadeem Aslam creates a closely observed and affecting portrait of people whose traditions threaten to bury them alive. The result is a tour de force, intimate, affecting, tragic and suspenseful.

The Washington Post - James A. Miller

For readers who have traveled with Scooter/Schoolboy on the earlier stages of his journey, reading The Magic Keys will be like rejoining an ongoing conversation with an old friend; for those who have not, it would probably be worthwhile to get acquainted with Murray first before taking the plunge.

About the Author, Albert Murray

Albert Murray was born in Nokomis, Alabama, in 1916. He grew up in Mobile and was educated at Tuskegee Institute, where he later taught literature and directed the college theater. He is a retired U.S. Air Force major. Albert Murray is author of The Omni-Americans; Stomping the Blues; The Hero and the Blues; Train Whistle Guitar; The Spyglass Tree; The Seven League Boots; South to a Very Old Place; Conjugations and Reiterations; and From the Briarpatch File; as well as co-author of Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie and Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. He lives in New York City.

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Editorials

James A. Miller

Library Journal

Murray is best known as a jazz historian and social critic and for his friendship with writer Ralph Ellison, which resulted in the wonderful collection of letters, Trading Twelves. In 1974, he published Train Whistle Guitar, the first volume in his autobiographical saga illustrating his controversial thesis that American culture is not divided into strict categories of black and white but is instead a hybrid, "omni-American" mix. In this fourth and final installment, Alabama-born Scooter is enrolled in graduate school at New York University. He haunts the neighborhood bookstores, galleries, and jazz clubs and spends hours chatting with his friend Taft Edison, a writer struggling to create a new fictional language. Murray forgoes dramatic action for conversation, writing in a vivid blend of slang and hardcore intellectualism similar to what he first proposed in The Hero and the Blues (1973). Recommended as a rhapsodic tour guide to mid-century New York and as a unique take on American race relations. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/05.]-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Murray writes jazz: A colorful riff on coming of age in the city. In the final installment of his four-part bildungsroman, octogenarian Murray (Trainwhistle Guitar, 1976, The Spyglass Tree, 1991, The Seven League Boots, 1996) revisits his semiautobiographical character Scooter for an exuberant intellectual romp around the streets of 1930s New York. After a few years on the road playing bass with the legendary Bossman, the brilliant, wandering Scooter arrives in New York to pursue a master's in the humanities-and meets up with old friends. Beyond the reaches of campus, the streets and studios of New York offer an ongoing moveable feast of ideas. Scooter reconnects with Taft Edison, a Ralph Ellison-like writer working to bring the down-home idiom into his ever expanding novel; Royal Highness, a magnanimous big man from the band days, and Roland Beasely, a vibrant, imaginative painter. As Scooter and compatriots duck in and out of bars, art galleries and jazz clubs discussing French poetry, soul food and cubist art, Scooter seems to be always on the verge of finding the magic keys to his own inner music, to art, to literature and perhaps to life itself. If the book is salted with Taft's discussions about how to bring the black idiom into the novel, Murray seems to have found his own inimitable solution: for page after page, the prose rocks, croons and sings. When it sometimes seems that nothing is happening, the jaunty swinging language it's not happening in<\> propels the ear forward nonetheless. As Murray writes, "describing . . how the sounds are made is elementary for musicians themselves, but all of that is only a matter of craft. But when my band plays something I want the craft to addup to what good music is supposed to do for people who come to hear it and dance. . . ."Crooning in tune with the ear and with life, Murray's saga vamps, dancing, to a glorious end.