Writing
Fugitive
In 1917, a young composer writes a suite of twenty pieces for piano. They are short, violent and strange, the music of another world. In 1938, a young Jewish family flees Italy for Sydney, Australia.
In 1942, another family, this time Polish, are nearly destroyed. Half a century later, a young man begins to understand the role these strange visions have played in everything that came before him and all that has come to be.
Fugitive, Simon Tedeschi’s first book, straddles the borders of poetry and prose, fiction and fact, trauma and testimony, filled with what Russian poet Konstantin Balmont called “the fickle play of rainbows.”
Shortlisted in the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
Shortlisted in the 2023 Judith Wright Calanthe Award
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“The stanzas of Fugitive are rooms in a house through which memory, music and contemplation move. Like exquisite slivers of light under a door, or from a night window, they are acute, angular and darting, flaring against the dark shapes of history and memory. Haunting the structures of a piano suite, Fugitive is a mobile and musical work whose ideas circulate, restively reshaping and recasting each theme. Arch, tender and playful, this is a startling, evocative and moving debut.”
– Felicity Plunkett
“A sparkling, minimalist meditation on what it means to make meaning. Imagine the ghosts of Kafka and Prokofiev and a queue of similar enigmas playing a tag-team fugue in a vivid, wry dream.”
–Ross Gibson
“What a profound gift for all of us that Simon Tedeschi is more than usually attuned to the tones of life, both harmonic and unstable. Artfully and honestly, he weaves together these shimmering fragments of sound, feeling, philosophy and embodied experience into a work of art so exquisite it will leave you in silent, breathless appreciation.”
–Ceridwen Dovey
“…a book whose genre is difficult to describe – memoir? meditations? prose-poetry? music? – but whose achievement is clear…Such preoccupations – emigrants, memory, trauma, time – recall the works of W.G. Sebald…Tedeschi emerges from his hothouse not just as a pianist of note, but as a writer of distinction…any solipsism is redeemed by the humility that inflects almost every line…profound and fleet-footed…It is a joy to hear a mind engage so unashamedly with deep culture and with inner life, unbeholden to the increasingly totalitarian demands of what can and cannot be a subject for literature. In Fugitive, Tedeschi has created something singular and startling, as ephemeral and as resonant as music.”
-Anna Goldsworthy, The Monthly
“Amazing.”
Diana Simmonds, Limelight
“Tedeschi is equally impressive on the page as he is at the piano…that essay will give readers an idea of the quality of Tedeschi’s lithe and lyrical prose but will not prepare them for the book’s formal inventiveness…”
Ned Hirst, Artshub
“What Fugitive does is to enact the sensation that emerges when you play or listen to music: a tactile excitement, a kinaesthetic sense of the sacred… a slim volume in dreamlike shards…Fugitive is a book of pauses.”
Imogen Dewey, Sydney Review of Books
…a shimmering meditation on performance, identity and music.”
Michael Winkler, SMH/The Age
“…a singularly spectacular expression of art.”
Nicole Rain Sellers, Cordite Poetry Review
“…it transforms time and encourages the ability to hold multiple, often contradictory truths, true poet’s work…self-aware and beautiful…a work of scholarship…here is so much compacted into each of these small pieces and yet Fugitives is airy, with enough space to encompass contradiction, breath and above all, silence, another recurring theme. This is the kind of book you can dip into repeatedly, each time finding something new.”
Magdalena Ball, Compulsive Reader
Released through Upswell in May 2022
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