Anaylysis of the novel " Mestro"

Peter Goldworthy, a distinguished writer and winner of numerous literary awards has created a vivid life in the tropical hothouse of Darwin in description of 'Maestro'. It is against this backdrop that Goldworthy introduces Paul Crabbe, a young Southerner who encounters the 'Maestro', a talented pianist with a shadowy past. With a combination of irony and compassionate wit, Goldworthy explores a number of clearly relevant themes based around the two characters, of Eduard Keller and Paul Crabbe. These themes include, the Holocaust and its Lessons, the paradox of human nature, passion or intellect, ego versus others and the loss of innocence.

The effect of the holocaust is one of the effective themes explored by the author Peter Goldsworthy in the novel Maestro. By revisiting the Holocaust Goldsworthy enables us to learn two lessons. Firstly that there is the way atrocities affect not just the victims but also the survivors. It is through the characterization of Keller that we are able to understand this.

Keller aufgeräumt

Eduard Keller

Maestro (novel)

Keller has effectively been broken by what happened to him in the past, his wife and children were murdered in one of the Nazi camps). His old acquaintances think he died in 1994, and in a sense he did. Leaving aside his partial reawakening by involvement with the boy Paul, he is to all intent and purposes a lost soul-drunken life hating hopeless, keeping in mind that the incidents, which happened to Keller, happened to him a whole generation earlier. From this we come to a conclusion that cruelty kills people physiologically.

The great German Philosopher Friedrich Neir came up with a fascinating theoretical opposition in his observation of human behaviour. He dubbed the tension between the dionysiac or appolian. Appolian or intellect is orderly and safe but can be arid, the dionysiac or passion is seductive...