Rose Tremain: The Gustav Sonata (September 2025)

The book is set in a small Swiss town and is structured, like a sonata, in three parts covering the years between 1937 and 2002.

Gustav Perle, born in 1942, lives with his widowed mother in poverty in a grim apartment. His mother, Emilie, is a depressed and embittered woman with a dislike and resentment of Jewish people which is linked to her husband’s death in a way that is not yet made clear to the reader.

Gustav makes friends with a new boy at school. Anton Zwiebel, a Jewish boy, has escaped from Nazi Germany with his parents, Adriana and Armin, who has a well-paid job in a Swiss bank. Gustav is invited to their home and included in treats and outings giving him pleasure that has been lacking in his life. They go skating on Sundays and it was distressing when this is stopped when Emilie organises extra tuition on that day and another boy takes his place.

Anton plays the piano well and his mother arranges for him to enter a competition in Berne, accompanied by Gustav. He is ill with stagefright at the prospect of playing in front of a large audience which is put down to nerves but it seems that Anton is not quite the prodigy that his mother thinks he is.

Gustav also goes on holiday with them to Davos and the boys play at nursing patients back to health at a derelict TB sanitorium. A kiss, disguised as a kiss of life, is shared. Davos often reappears in the book as a motif, symbolising healing through beauty, nature and fresh mountain air.

The second section of the novel takes the reader back to 1937 when Emilie met Erich, Assistant Police Chief, and their hasty marriage as a baby is expected. Emilie is happy for the only time in her life with a handsome husband and a lovely apartment, but it doesn’t last.

War is looming and Erich is overwhelmed at work with Jewish refugees trying to find safety as Switzerland closes its borders. He takes out his frustration on Emilie, accusing her of having no interest in what is happening and throws her across the kitchen. She loses the baby and, soon after, when Erich is discovered falsifying visas for Jewish refugees and sacked, also loses her home and their income.

She goes to stay with her mother in her wretched hovel for a while but their relationship is fraught so she returns, hoping to be able to forgive her husband.

Erich has begun a passionate affair with Lottie, his colleague’s wife. She is warm, sensual and voluptuous, the opposite of his wife, but Emilie and Erich have Gustav only for Erich to die of a heart attack at Lottie’s door.

Emilie blames Jewish people for all her ills including the stress that caused her husband’s death.

The third part, somewhat startlingly we thought, skips to 1992. Emilie is still alive but is soon to die.

Gustav now owns a hotel having had an unexpected inheritance from Emilie’s mother. Where this money came from is not explained. He enjoys running the hotel and providing a comfortable refuge for himself and his guests. He is particularly moved when a retired and recently widowed British colonel unburdens himself by telling Gustav that he is still haunted by being one of the first people to enter Belsen aged only nineteen.

He encourages Gustav to find out more about the father he never knew and, in doing so, meets Lottie and the two become friends until her death, even going to stay in Paris together.

Anton has found his vocation as an inspiring and much-loved music teacher but it is so instilled in him by his mother that he is an exceptionally talented musician that he allows himself to be taken by an impresario to produce records in Geneva. They live together in a destructive relationship with Anton feeling enslaved and powerless. He has a breakdown and is admitted to a psychiatric hospital seemingly too unwell to be helped.

Gustav comes to his aid and Anton begs to be taken to Davos. The hotel is sold and the two set up home in Davos, with Anton’s mother. He begins to recover and composes a sonata dedicated to Gustav.

Again, there were mixed reactions to the book. Those who read the book twice found that they appreciated it more on second reading.

Some of us were moved by the story but for others it was a bit flat, although they didn’t mind the melancholy aspects of the book.

We discussed Swiss neutrality and thought that the characters mirrored the country’s isolation, Emilie in particular showed the importance of connecting to others. Her life could have been so much better if she had not been so wrapped up in her own misery.

It was suggested that Gustav lacked love but he had a gift for making friends. Even his employees at the hotel were very fond of him.

Was the ending too happy and contrived or inevitable and welcome? The two seemed distanced but kept in touch, though Anton could be thoughtless and selfish.

The war and the suffering of the Jews cast a shadow over the novel. Anton’s parents carried great guilt about surviving the war in safety and comfort and the Swiss banks where his father worked were under investigation up until his death at the end of the book.

Erich was based on Paul Gruninger, a Swiss Police officer who was sacked, ostracised and died in poverty for helping around 3600 Jewish refugees by falsifying their documents.

3/5