The Lost Stradivarius

By John Meade Falkner

Book Overview

Chilling in the extreme, The Lost Stradivarius is a classic tale of the supernatural. While practicing in his rooms in Oxford, gifted violinist John Maltravers notices a strange phenomenon: whenever a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0486243346
• ISBN13: 9780486243344
• Release Date: August 1982
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Length: 93 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.

Customer Reviews

For Meade Falkner Fans

Not the greatest story ever, but for fans of Moonfleet who wish to see another facet of John Meade Falkner mind, it is well worth reading. It is a strange, sometimes eerie story, which will keep your attention until the very end.

In excelsis, de profundis

John Meade Falkner did not seem to consider novel-writing the most important thing in his life; he wrote three novels in a matter of less than ten years, and spend the rest of his life as an antiquarian, a librarian, and the top executive of a major munitions manufacturing firm. But the three Gothic novels he wrote are all one of a kind and were written with an incredible sense of surety and deftness. THE LOST STRADIVARIUS is a beautifully constructed ghost story, concerning a Victorian Oxford student and music aficionado who discovers an eighteenth-century Italian musical suite; when he plays a certain section of it with his friend in his rooms in Magdalen Hall, a presence seems to stir around them. This only starts the tale, which manages to synthesize a fantastic array of fin-de-siecle concerns, including homoeroticism (as Tom Paulin suggests in his brief foreword to this nice little Hesperus edition, the figure of Oscar Wilde surely haunts this work as much as the fictional ghost of Adrian Temple), decadence, anti-Catholicism, and Paterian aestheticism. The great pleasures of Falkner's fiction are his striking ability to convey atmosphere and his precocious gift for showing and not telling when it comes to character and suspense.

Timeless ghost story

The ghost story is by & large ideally realized as a short story or at most novella -- the greatest masters, such as M. R. James, never even attempted the novel form; & those who did both short stories and novels, such as E. F. Benson, only the short stories are of outstanding merit. At novel length they tend to bog down considerably or else descend into tedious gothicisms & inessential asides. But Falkner's THE LOST STRADIVARIUS is a perfect gem of a novel, a timeless tale of weird & awe inspiring ghostliness, easily in the top ten of Victorian ghost novels, in an unfailingly elegant style.-Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Violet Books