GOODREADS – THE SWAN IS FLYING OUT
GOODREADS have launched our GIVEAWAY contest: duration for one week,: September 9-16, and only FIVE FREE AUTHOR SIGNED COPIES, postage paid. Competition appears severe.
Go to: goodreads.cohttps://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/153831-enchanting-the-swan
After just one day, more than 100 entries have already been made, all eager to read this moving novel about two grad students and passionate musicians, Paul, pianist, and Fiona, cellist, whose love life at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg falls apart after a brilliant and promising beginning. If you click in the photographs most computers will enlarge the picture.
They kiss for the first time on this famous Crim Dell Bridge at W & M, after successfully performing their program’s rehearsal before friends, teachers and a few faculty members in the Ewell Hall. The summit of the program is The Swan by Camille St. Saëns. This is a great moment for them. Then graduation comes and their love is shattered by Fiona’s godparents in her home country, Belgium, who do not consider Paul a good enough match in their noble family. Paul visits her family in Brussels, but the father is hostile, the mother cool, distant, and reserved, though she points out where Fiona can be reached. Then he meets distressed Fiona, who has to abide by her family’s dictum: as her parents had willed it, she must marry into her own noble Belgian circle. It is all written down in her parents’ testament. A young nobleman she has known when studying at the Free University of Brussels will become her husband. She forces the break-up with Paul during lunch at the Grand Place, and Paul is devastated.
Restaurant-bar Roi d’Espagne, on the right where Fiona breaks-up in tears.
Only much later does Paul find out that Fiona’s godfather, a senior manager at the Brussels’ Société Générale, and her future husband, also a banker – had only one thing in mind: remain the masters of her sizable trust fund for their own gain.
Paul finishes an advanced investment seminar at Brussels University (ULB) but does not see Fiona anymore. To his chagrin, the decision is final and cannot be rescinded.
To get rid of his sour mind and keep his sanity, Paul plays piano at the Salle Delveau in the “Cité”. He is lucky that a guest speaker at his investment course is impressed with his mathematical skills and offers him a job at the Geneva branch of First Swiss Bank. So, deeply hurt Paul travels to Geneva with the TGV to start his career, completely the opposite of what he had hoped for with Fiona in New York.
Paul’s bank on the left
But Geneva proves Paul’s pitfall: the girls he meets are aloof or insensitive, except one who is married. Higher-ups in his bank are scheming to make clandestine money and the fat girl Diane he helps on the ski slopes turns out the daughter of the wealthy and influential businessman involved. High up in the Jura Diane forces him to be the whistleblower of the scheme in the bank to save her father from downfall and bankruptcy. It nearly destroys his internship and he must return to the USA.
View of the Mont Blanc from the Dôle on the Swiss Jura near Geneva where Diane gives Paul her bombshell.
A hasty departure for New York follows after Paul completes his internship successfully and, despite all what happened, with distinction. He is transferred to First Swiss Bank in New York in a managerial position.
And then by sheer coincidence he meets the son of Fiona’s aunt at an office party, who tells him Fiona is in New York, shattered by an abusive relationship and divorcing! They meet at a house concert at Fiona’s aunt…can they put humpty-dumpty back together again or not? A long struggle that ends up with a loud shot!
BANG-BANG!!!
NOW YOU HAVE A CHANCE TO READ THIS STORY TOO!
PARTICIPATE IN THE GOODREADS GIVEAWAY FOR A FREE SIGNED COPY POSTAGE PAID…ONLY TILL SEPTEMBER 16!
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JOHN
Born in Amsterdam One
Born in Amsterdam fills me with pride every time I get back to my home town. I realized this first in Paris where I studied in 1964 and heard Jacques Brel singing, for the first time, “Dans le Port d’Amsterdam”, in the famous Olympia Hall. A song about sailors eating, drinking, burping, and having fun with Amsterdam’s fabulous women of pleasure that today draw even schoolgirls from Japan under tight escort to their splendid vitrines. Perhaps to tell them what they should not be doing, or what their boyfriends/husbands pilots and sailors might be doing when landing in Amsterdam Port or Schiphol.Extending to a roaring climax, the song tore my heart apart. But was that Amsterdam? I had more romantic visions.
The River Amstel in fog, as painted by my nephew, Dutch painter, Michiel Kranendonk
or a sunlit bridge over an Amsterdam canal on a quiet Sunday morning, also painted by Michiel,
or the first visit to Amsterdam by Queen Elisabeth in 1958 that I pictured with a prehistoric camera.
after which I dropped by a dear school friend, who lived in a turret of a canal house along Prinsen Gracht (Princes’ Canal). I remember dropping a bag full of fried rice out of his window because what he served me was inedible and it fell on the head of an innocent person strolling along the canal on his evening walk. We checked and miraculously he survived, even though with a headache.
Not long thereafter I attended the Matheus Passion at the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam’s famous Concert Hall) with my mother and we walked along the Rijksmuseum ( in the back of the picture) and Jan Luikenstraat 2 where I was born. A moment I won’t forget.
It was said that Jacques Brel did not like Amsterdam. As he was from Belgium, the other “lowland”south of the Dutch border, this didn’t surprise me. It must have been in-born jealousy, as Antwerp – a port city I like very much by the way – could never match Amsterdam port city despite all its efforts. But I loved Jacques Brel’s songs.
Amsterdam is ubiquitous in the World. In Paris there is Rue d’Amsterdam, linking it with Gare St. Lazar, and the best French cheese shop (Androuet) in town.
New York was New Amsterdam, as everyone knows. The Dutch were there first.
And there are 16 towns in the USA with the name of Amsterdam. If we had not lost one of those many sea battles with the Perfidious Albion, New York would still have been New Amsterdam. Wall Street would have been Dijk Straat or “Dike Street” and Yankee would have been “Jan Kees”. Both British Guyana and Dutch Suriname in Caribbean South America were once Dutch colonies. Both have a town named New Amsterdam. In New Amsterdam in Guyana, which the Dutch got in return for New York (what a deal!) before the British stole it back again, I have never seen so many mosquitoes in my life. I had to shave myself dancing to avoid being bitten by swarms of these bloodsucking insects. New Amsterdam in Suriname wasn’t much better.
No, there is nothing more comforting than my old Amsterdam. Jules B. Barber, an American author, writes in his “Amsterdam” of 1975: “Amsterdam is a charming, dynamic, hustling, tolerant, greedy, seedy, beautiful, enlightened, socially oriented politically eruptive, warm, welcoming, “gezellig” (cozy), schizophrenic kind of place. It’s eternally young at heart despite its 700 years.” That’s all true. From Google images under “Amsterdam in Paris” I borrow a few pics that represent the sense of the city.
This is Amsterdam.
And this is Amsterdam.
Central Station at night as I pictured it from Hotel Victoria across the station.
A city of eternal youth, especially if you are over 70. Yet it is also the only place in the world where I was robbed three times of my travel bags. Multiculturalism has its charms and dissonants. Oh well, we “Amsterdammers” are “tolerant” (they say).
Next week when I am in Holland, Born in Amsterdam II.