This brilliant first novel is a portrait of an artist at the end of an art form. The elderly Jewish-Hungarian composer Schneidermann, who survived a musical education, survived the war, survived Europe, survived the neglect of all his music, finally and suddenly vanishes during a movie matinee on the Upper West Side of New York. The novel begins with Schneidermann's friend--his last friend, his only friend--the violin virtuoso Laster, on stage at Carnegie Hall. He has finished playing the first movement of Schneidermann's last composition, his Violin Concerto. At this point he is supposed to begin his cadenza...his solo. Instead, he drops his instrument and lifts his voice, delivering the text of this novel unto the audience, held captive through night into morning only by dint of the spiel. In its obsessions, its black humor, and its depth of multiple cultures, Laster's voice is a final great unwanted gift from the old world to the new. Somehow, at age 25, Cohen has created a requiem for high culture that in its disgusted wisdom, its layers of historical and cultural references, would seem to have come from a man of 90--except for the ruthless and hilarious energy of its gaze.