The Piano Tuner

 

The Piano Tuner

Chiang-Sheng Kuo translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-Chun Lin

Publication date: January 3, 2023 by Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing

Genre: Fiction

Rating: 2 🍷🍷

Summary: This bestseller and winner of every major literary award in Taiwan is an elegiac novel about love and loss, broken dreams and desolate hearts—and music: "A delightful read."—Ha Jin

A widower grieving for his young wife. A piano tuner concealing a lifetime of secrets. An out-of-tune Steinway piano. A journey of self-discovery across time and continents, from a dark apartment in Taipei’s red-light district to snow-clad New York.

 At the heart of the story is the nameless narrator, the piano tuner. In his forties, he is balding and ugly, a loser by any standard. But he was once a musical prodigy. What betrayal and what heartbreak made him walk away from greatness?

 Long hailed in Taiwan as a “writer’s writer,” Chiang-Sheng Kuo delivers a stunningly powerful, compact novel in The Piano Tuner. It’s a book of sounds: both of music and of the heart, from Rachmaninoff to Schubert, from Glenn Gould to Sviatoslav Richter, from untapped potential to unrequited love. With a cadence and precision that bring to mind Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, this short novel may be a portrait of the artist as a “failure,” but it also describes a pursuit of the ultimate beauty in music and in love.

My thoughts: Blogs cannot always be about books the reader likes. Sometimes one must reflect on why certain books don't quite hit the mark.

I expect this book will be more poignant for piano players than your average reader. At times the story read like a love letter to the piano. Those were beautiful and lyrical passages. Other times the book was a reflection of what was. It was overall hard to determine who the author wanted the book to be about. There were significant passages dedicated to the recently deceased Emily and her grieving husband Lin. The author did not provide enough development in that relationship to thoroughly flesh out what made Lin seek solace with the Piano Tuner. It seemed that the author  wanted to delve more into the life of the unnamed Piano Tuner due to the revelations about his past. The flashbacks though were not entirely fleshed out and didn't provide all of the context for the Piano Tuner's present state. The Piano Tuner was an unreliable narrator in that it seemed that he was also confused about what his purpose was in telling the story. While it was a short read there was a complex layering of thoughts and metaphors throughout its entirety. As this was a translated work I believe that some of the subliminal messages were lost. Personally I did not find any closure to the story at all. 

I received a copy of this title via NetGalley.