Wanderer

October 15, 2018
Léon's slim debut novel tells the story of a French composer and his former student, brilliant but difficult, who reappears unexpectedly after an absence of 10 years.The book opens with "a wandering silhouette, lost in the surrounding whiteness," chanting the words to the eponymous Schubert song. It's January in the lonely foothills of the Bourbonnais mountains. Hermin, a composer, has taken refuge in his work when a surprise visitor imposes on his solitude: Lenny, the piano prodigy he hasn't seen in a decade. "A teenager had left him; a man had returned." There are two central mysteries here: Why has Lenny come back into Hermin's life? And why did he leave so abruptly all those years before? Interwoven with the third-person account of their strained reunion is an extended flashback from Hermin's point of view, detailing how he first came to befriend the German teenager and eventually take him in. Other mysteries arise. What is behind Lenny's passionate insistence that he will never give another concert? Why won't he stop coughing? And why do these characters have such a hard time asking direct questions? Both writing and story are overwrought and often melodramatic: "music, that sovereign divinity, that inexpressible force to which he'd consecrated himself since childhood, and in which nothing, not absence, not even suffering, would ever be able to shake his faith." The mood grows claustrophobic. After revealing the truth about a decade-old betrayal, Lenny hurls himself coatless into a winter storm, risking death by exposure and compelling Hermin into the dark night after him. What claims are we allowed to make on the people we love? Léon seems to ask. And what do we owe those who love us in ways we can't reciprocate?Romantic with a capital R, the novel ultimately treats the relationship between the two men with a delicacy that is unexpectedly moving.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from October 22, 2018
Léon’s staggering debut uses musical structure and allusion to explore friendship and secrecy between two gifted young men. Composer Hermin secludes himself for winters at an estate in the Bourbonnais mountains in France. Lenny, a former friend and piano prodigy who disappeared suddenly a decade before, appears at his door. The two slowly and awkwardly get reacquainted, and, from this point, Léon tells the history of their friendship in paragraphs that alternate between the present and 10 years prior. Hermin is a conservatory student in Paris when he meets teenaged Lenny, a foreigner with impressive raw talent but a strained life caring for his seriously ill aunt. Hermin provides lessons and space for Lenny to practice and eventually invites him to move into his apartment. The plot centers on Hermin’s failure even years later to understand Lenny’s peevish reactions to Hermin spending time with other friends and questions surrounding Lenny’s abrupt retirement from performance shortly before arriving. The men’s interactions frequently mirror citations from Schubert’s songs, especially as the reasons for Lenny’s reappearance become clearer. Léon’s innovative blending of events across time and her delicate emotional precision make for a bewitching, immersive experience.

December 1, 2018

Debut Appropriately, Léon's very title evokes Schubert's music (the Wanderer Fantasy in C Major) and the setting even more so: one frigid January night in France's Bourbonnais Mountains, composer Hermin is unexpectedly visited by Lenny, the piano prodigy he discovered and encouraged yet who abandoned him years ago. In the spirit of Schubert's great song cycle Die Winterreise ("Winter Journey"), the despairing Lenny has trudged through the snow with a purpose he won't easily reveal. The narrative shifts seamlessly between the third-person present and Hermin's first-person recall of meeting Lenny when he wanders into the piano store where Hermin works and enthralls him with his playing. Hermin jeopardizes his own career and wrecks his romance with Iris for a friendship that becomes obsessively close, and though the reason for Lenny's desertion will be immediately apparent, the details resonate. VERDICT Occasionally cloying, this splendidly translated debut is nevertheless an atmospheric, delicately wrought study of misunderstood emotion, heartbreaking yet incisive; knowing classical music increases the reading pleasure but isn't necessary.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2018
Hidden away amid the snow-covered forest near the Bourbonnais Mountains of France dwells a composer in self-induced seclusion trying to complete a frustrating work inspired by Schubert. The composer's wintry cabin silence is broken by the unscheduled arrival of a former piano student turned virtuoso, who has just publicly announced that he will never play piano again. What follows is a revealing exploration of the relationship between the young composer, Hermin, and the young man, Lenny. First-novelist L�on creates a sense of comfort even as the tension between the two men builds, much like the snow that continues to fall outside the isolated cabin. Their unresolved past ripples through the book in italicized moments, but never jarringly so. L�on's tale is an homage to Schubert and German Romanticism as a brooding tone underlines the pair's resentment and dependence on each other, which seethes just below the surface during their conversations in the forest and silent moments by the fire. L�on perfectly measures out past and present to reach a satisfying and intimate crescendo.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)