Clara Yehonala plays Chopin in Robert Barclay’s new novel
Clara is Katy’s gifted Eurasian daughter and travels the world as a celebrated piano virtuoso known as the Jade Princess.
Clara’s musical performance is at the Pleyel Concert Hall in Paris and is itself the end of another story — a promise kept by two generations of Yehonalas to an old man who listens enraptured to Clara’s music.
The novel, The Diary of Katy Yehonala is a story of love as well as a love story. Three generations of amazing women face their personal demons and stand strong and proud against the challenges their tumultuous country throws against them.
The storyteller is Ye Meiling, later to become the irrepressible Katy Yehonala. Katy, her indomitable mother, and her daughter Clara, each have their destinies forged by revolutionary times. Their extraordinary lives mirror their homeland’s rocky coming of age.
The three women, in a way, are “universal women” struggling to cast aside their cultural millstones, each to travel the world along their separate paths like modern-day Marco Polo’s, eventually to honour family and the humanity they share.
And what of Clara? Well, Clara’s a delicious dilemma for us, though perhaps she isn’t so hard to understand once you get to know her.
