Reviews

The Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2007
www.PGBULLETIN.com

Only Moments
Nick Oliva, 2007, ISBN 1-4241-7077-X. (This book may be ordered on line.) By Xavier K. Maruyama

Only Moments begins as an almost science fiction book imbedded in the year 2020. A sixty-six year-old professional musician, who is still alive because of the medical technology available in the future, mourns for his wife who died some fifteen years before. Then the book shifts to his youth, where he finds himself living the wandering life of the 1970s. He meets the love of his life while standing outside a house where a young violinist is practicing. Her parents discover him lurking outside, but rather than calling the cops, they invite him in. Times were more trusting then. Chris Vadia uses his innate skills to accompany the violinist on the piano, and the two form the bonds to “make music” together.

There are discoveries, romance, marriage, struggle, careers, loss of parents, togetherness and separation, living together, yet apart. The reader can identify with the adventures of the couple. Los Angeles, Big Sur, New York, driving across the country and college all connect to events in the reader’s own life. Only Moments is a love story imbedded in a biography. This is the story, not only of the main character, but of the author, Nick Oliva, and contains elements of our own personal lives. The book is a novel and the author is able to tie together coherently the many incoherent events of every person’s life.

The author Nick Oliva has been a musician, composer, and money manager, among many other things. He has experienced physical pain and medical incapacity, so to him, the technologies he describes in the first part of his book appear commonplace. Only Moments should appeal to the readers who can allow themselves to become emotionally involved with someone else’s life.

It must be the water or the fog along our coastline that brings out the writer in so many people who have lived here. It is apparent that Nick Oliva is very familiar with Monterey and exhibits the literary talent so prevalent in our environs.

A moving story with an important message
By  T. Shulman    

I enjoyed this book very much. It is a love story combined with detailed passages of different time periods in history, scenes of great beauty, and the world of music. The reader experiences many emotions throughout the story and gains a true feeling about the importance of living every day to its fullest. I recommend this book to adult readers of every age as it relates to different times 

Only Moments proved to be a Catharsis of Many of Life's Emotions
By  Viva Vives 

Only Moments by Nick Oliva provides a Mind Transport from-and-to Reality. It is a Great Read filled with Creative Moments that transend generations.

A Well-Choreographed Stroboscopic View of an Artist's Journey, November 20, 2007
By  Malcolm R. Campbell "The Sun Singer" (Northeast Georgia) 

When you watch a man dancing on a dark stage in front of a flashing strobe light, you see only moments of the dance. Nick Oliva has taken the defining, and often poignant vignettes, of musician Chris Vadia's life and choreographed them into a remarkable novel.

We begin in the future, after all of the moments are long gone--a coming-of-age car trip, first love, marriage, marital strife, a husband-and-wife performance at Carnegie Hall, the death of a spouse--and look at events so fresh they appear to be happening now! But they are of the past and cannot be changed, and they take us--along with Chris--figuratively back in time and where they dance before our eyes in perfect detail before we move on.

The struggling Chris we find within each moment of his life's journey is not the Chris observing his past from the perspective of a man who learns, is learning, actually, that his seemingly disparate moments of joy and sorrow that appear to have been separated by time and space and vantage point are connected into a well-defined, sensible whole.

If you're a musician and/or if music impacts your life in meaningful ways, you will appreciate the impact of Oliva's experience as a musician on the piano/violin practice and performance scenes. But you'll also see as you read from moment to moment that music is one of several apt metaphors in "Only Moments." Life's moments are like the notes in a composer's great work in progress, a work that in spite of all the choices, false starts, crescendos, decrescendos, and improvisations, turns out the only way it possibly could have turned out.

"Only Moments" is the journey of a lifetime carried forward on the wings of Chris Vadia's stirring memories and Nick Oliva's stirring prose.