Urs Widmer Der Geliebte der Mutter (A Devoted Life) Diogenes Verlag, August 2000, 130 pp. ISBN 3-257 06245 1 All art exacts its price, and the one who pays it in this novel is Clara Molinari, the narrator's mother, whose life-long passion for a famous orchestral conductor brings her nothing but wretchedness. The book opens and closes with her death at nearly ninety. The chapters in between tell their two stories. Edwin, the conductor, comes from a humble background. He scrapes together the money to study music, only to discover that his skill lies neither in performing nor composing but in conducting, since he instinctively possesses the ability to 'hear' the sound of a work merely by studying the score. He founds an orchestra to play the new and then unknown composers, Bartok, Krenek and Prokoviev, and it is at this stage that Clara offers to work in his support. Her own background is considerably more affluent than his. Her father, Ultimo, so called because he was the last of twelve children, is of African descent, his grandfather having found his way to Italy and settled in Domodossola. Educated by the Jesuits, the boy works his way up the managerial hierarchy of a machine factory to become its vice-president, then goes bankrupt in the financial crisis of 1929. As Clara's fortunes decline, Edwin's rise. They have a brief love affair, which results in Clara having an abortion, then drift apart. Edwin marries the wealthy heiress of the very factory in which Clara's father had worked. She continues to admire him from afar. But when the narrator informs him of her death it is clear that he can hardly remember her. Alfred Schlienger has called Urs Widmer 'the most versatile and yet most focused, the most light-footed and yet perhaps the most serious of Swiss writers'. Swiss and German critics are hailing this as his best novel. The lively characterisations, the introduction of real-life composers, performers and politicians and the authenticity of the musical background all add strength to a story with a very human theme: devoted woman ditched by callous man on the make.