More than two decades after Canadian pianist Glenn Gould burst onto the music scene in 1955 with revolutionary performances of Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations, the young writer Nancy Huston made her literary debut with a novel called Les variations Goldberg/The Goldberg Variations (1981). The story unfolds on a mid-summer evening, as Liliane Kulainn performs Bach's Goldberg variations for friends at her Parisian apartment. As she plays, Liliane imagines the thoughts of the people in the audience, authoring thirty potential responses to her performance.

The novel itself is a remarkable performance on several levels: firstly, Huston chooses to write in French, a language she adopted as an adult. Second, the novel's form mirrors its content. It appropriates the structure of Bach's Goldberg Variations—thirty variations framed by an aria on either end—in order to stage a performance and its critical reception. The author paints a portrait of contemporary Parisian society while presenting wide-ranging perspectives on music and performance. Significantly, she brings music performance into relation with ongoing literary debates over the nature of voice, the role of the author, and the practice of interpretation.

Huston, like Samuel Beckett, writes interchangeably in French and English, and translates her own works. Born in Calgary, Canada in 1953, and raised first in Alberta and then Boston, her childhood was marked by the traumatic departure of her mother when she was only six years old. Huston embarked for Paris as a twenty-year-old college student and fell in love. Although she initially intended to spend just the academic year in France, she stayed on to write her Masters thesis under the supervision of Roland Barthes, and developed a keen sensitivity to the ideology of language and style. According to Huston, Barthes often fantasized about writing fiction, but was too caught up in technical questions.4 She began work on her first novel shortly after her mentor's death and never looked back, producing a dozen novels, three works of theater, and multiple collections of essays. Her fiction has earned France's top literary prizes, including the Prix Femina (in 2006 for Lignes de faille/ Fault Lines)and the Goncourt des lycéens (in 1996 for L'empreinte de l'ange/ The Mark of the Angel), and garnered prestigious—if controversial—awards in Britain and Canada as well.