Reality In Maestro

Maestro, a beautifully crafted novel written by the author Peter Goldsworthy, deals with the exploration of numerous aspects including the main contention of whose reality. It presents the unrealistic views or false realities that we humans can perceive wrongly of ourselves and others. As this is proven in the novel, the main protagonist Paul Crabbe has many artificial views of what he perceives himself to be and the type of person Edward Keller (Maestro) is. However, our realities can ultimately change for the better once we have the realisation of what is actually occurring.

In the beginning of the novel we can clearly see that Paul has no respect for Keller what so ever. His first impressions of him were “Keller’s red face also glistened with a fine varnish of sweat – but the linen suit still seemed crisp and freshly laundered,” this passage tells the reader of
By thinking this he thought he was invincible "becoming so visible so that nothing can touch him". At the time of the war, it was promised that his wife and child would not be harmed if he played for the Nazis. Unfortunately this was not the case. After losing his family, his reality has been a constant escape, trying to run away from his past and the burden of thinking it was his fault for the death of the people during the holocaust. We see Keller as just an arrogant person but he was never like this until the remorse and regret of his past transformed him into an entirely different person. Keller’s frequent reminders of Vienna are taken from clippings from newspapers his “textbooks”. Keller only continues to see the bad and human cruelty there is and that then becomes his only perception of the world. "The thousands of stories of human foolishness and greed and cruelty that he had tried to patch together into some kind of understanding of his fellow beings" depicts Keller's