This was July's Book Club read, I must admit I was a little apprehensive as I'm not a dancer, I've never really been interested in dancing or learning anything about it. The book is about a professional ballet dancer and I did think that I'd plow through but not really understand or get into the book. How wrong I was.The book starts by meeting Kate, Kate threw her neck out in the middle of Swan Lake last night. Kate is a soloist in a New York City ballet company, her younger sister Gwen is a wonder child, a principal whose career overtook Kate's quickly. Gwen recently suffered something of a mental breakdown which we find out more about later in the book. The book begins with a genuinely funny description of Swan Lake, something which was useful for a heathen like me who hasn't seen it or even knows anything about it. The book gets behind the glamour of ballet dancing to the real life, exhausting, sweaty, pressured world that these dancers live in.The characters were wonderfully written, some very stereotypical, some very real and all funny. Some passages and chapters literally had me on the edge of my seat, I couldn't believe that so near the end something so major was going to happen. Luckily, it was avoided, but it really was a heartstopping few pages. The book was also quite emotional, there was a lot of dry humour slotted in some very deep and meaningful insights into sisterly love, rivalry and jealousy in equal measure.I would really recommend this book, especially if you have ever been a ballet dancer, it would almost certainly resonate closely with any experiences you may have had. I'm now off to watch Black Swan and find some more ballet based fiction to read. If you like dancing so much or especially ballet, this is a must-read book you ought to have. Me? I like ballet (only able to watch the ballerina's dancing) but I don't know much about it. It's like there is a sonorous mystery moves the ballerina every time they are on stage, dancing. It's what I saw while reading it."I'm standing in my dressing room now. I am here. i am in the present tense. I'm not always here, and sometimes here is a difficult place. Sometimes it is a labyrinth, or a Minotaur, or a rope I can neither let go of nor follow. It's hard to find the right words, but I guess I would say that it's something like feeling the floor"But what thrilled me the most about its story is the relationship of Cranes sisters. Kate and Gwen Crane. You'll find it both cherish and despise in such sisterhood relationship, revealing the private lives of two dancers and also the boundaries between them as sisters.Kate is a soloist in a ballet company and Gwen, her younger sister,is a principal in that same company. For average people like me who know nothing about ballet would find that being principal is better than a soloist. But, Gwen is sick. She is recovering from a nervous breakdown and Kate just threw out her neck. "I threw my neck out in the middle of Swan lake last night"
What do You think about Traumtänzer (2012)?
The Crane sisters dance. Super hard to stop reading. Recommended.
—AndrewVincent
