the violin conspiracy by brendan slocumb

She gives Ray confidence and guidance on how to live as a Black man: “You work twice as hard. Jane Ciabattari: Your narrator, Ray’s grandmother Nora, is the crucial figure in his emotional life as he is growing up. She gives him the violin handed down from her father, a talented musician who had been enslaved by the Marks family. All while writing the next book, which my editor’s just given me feedback on, and which I’m very excited about! Then, hopefully, it’ll be on to Book Three.”

Launching this novel has been challenging but fun: scheduling video calls, taking a ton of notes, and meeting people for interviews has been a new, welcoming experience-something to juggle while I’ve been doing my best to get back to a normal life of teaching and playing music live again. “2,000 to 2,500 words a day was easy to schedule when you’re stuck in the house all day. “The last two years have been insane for everyone, of course, but the pandemic actually allowed me the time to write regularly,” he explained. Our conversation took place as Slocumb was preparing to publish his first novel and had just completed his second, about a music historian and a computer linguist who discover America’s most celebrated composer was a fraud. Absolutely not.’ Finally, the tragic events of 2020 made it seem like this was a moment when I could tell my stories, and that people would actually listen to me, acknowledge my experiences, and not deny that my perspective was as valid as theirs.” When I told people about things that happened in my life, people would say, ‘No, you’re exaggerating. My perspective was vastly different from what they were used to, and by ‘different’ it seemed that it also meant that my perspective was wrong. But they didn’t seem to want to hear what I faced as a Black man.

Which is fine: I don’t need people to feel sorry for me. “Nobody really cared how hard it was to play the violin, or felt sorry for me if I couldn’t take private lessons. “I know, being in the classical music world, that there are a lot of people just like me, with similar stories, and we’ve never had the opportunity to tell them before,” he explains.

The book is based in part on his own experiences as a concert violinist. Brendan Slocumb is clear about the lived experience behind The Violin Conspiracy, a propulsive first novel about the theft of a Stradivarius valued at $10 million on the eve of the international Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

The violin conspiracy by brendan slocumb