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.
