In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Jessica Francis Kane’s Fonseca is a brilliantly imagined and incredibly moving novel.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“A masterful novel… Adding to the rich tension between fact and fiction are undated letters from the real Valpy and Fitzgerald’s older daughter, Tina, to an unidentified recipient concerning the 1952 trip. It amounts to a luminous exploration of a woman’s desperation and resilience.””
In her own words, here is Jessica Francis Kane’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Fonseca:
My Fonseca soundtrack is really three soundtracks reflecting just how long it took me to write this novel. It started with the soundtrack to Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, which I played on repeat through the first year of the pandemic. Every aesthetic choice in that film seemed to speak to the world I wanted to create in Fonseca: beautiful, sometimes whimsical, old-fashioned. I was trying to put myself in a very English mindset in order to understand a very English character (Penelope Fitzgerald). I had to get her across the ocean and down to northern Mexico in 1952 and it seemed to me there were useful parallels in all the to-ing and fro-ing around Austen’s Highbury as imagined by de Wilde and set to music by Isobel Waller-Bridge and David Schweitzer. My favorite tracks are the opening “Emma is Lost” (that clock chiming still makes me feel like I should be sitting at my desk), “Mr. Knightley” with the distant, calling horns, and “Emma is Lost” with its wordless, yearning voice.
For two years Emma was the only thing I listened to when I was working on Fonseca, so when in late 2022 I abruptly stopped, my family thought I’d given up on the book. I had not! But the lockdowns were over and my work had moved into a different phase. Penelope was in Mexico, a guest of two wealthy, elderly, Irish ex-pats. I started listening to the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, a South American composer these Irish ladies would have known and likely admired (he was generally adored in his lifetime), especially the Bachiana brasilieras. Pretty soon I was listening only to No. 5, and then only to the Aria, and only as sung by Bidú Sayão. I couldn’t get enough of it. I played it on endless repeat. The final high A is the embodiment to me of reaching for something nearly impossible, and it seemed to ask the question I wanted the book to ask: How far would you go to secure a dream?
Eventually the Aria was the first piece on a short playlist I made called “Fonseca” that included some Mozart (always a good idea) for mood management on the harder days. I defy anyone to listen to the opening of the E-flat Piano Concerto and not feel better.
The final stage of music that built Fonseca came from my husband. One evening in the last year of writing, I came home from the library and he’d started dinner, accompanied by music—airy, romantic, in Spanish—I didn’t recognize. He’d found a playlist on Spotify of popular 1950s Mexican songs to honor Fonseca and it turned out to be just what the book and I needed. I read about Los Panchos and Los Tres Caballeros and listened to the playlist every day until the book was done. A few of my favorites are: “Tu Condena,” “Mar y cielo,” “Sin Ti,” and “Una Aventura Mas.”
I’m sorry to say that the magic all this music held for me while I was writing Fonseca is gone. I listened to everything again while writing this, but it’s nostalgia I hear and feel now. The alchemy that turned this music into writing fuel for Fonseca is gone. I suspect that’s how it’s supposed to work, but it makes me sad. All I can do is turn to the new soundtrack I’m making, still in its infancy, for the book I’m working on now.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Jessica Francis Kane’s playlist for her novel The Report
Jessica Francis Kane is the author of the national bestseller Rules for Visiting, This Close, The Report, and Bending Heaven. This Close was longlisted for The Story Prize, The Report was a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and Rules for Visiting was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in many publications, including Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, ZYZZYVA, and Granta. She lives in New York City and Connecticut.