The Piano Tuner

by Kuo, Chiang-Sheng
4.2 out of 5 Customer Rating
ISBN: 9781956763416
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Used - Hardcover - 9781956763416

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Overview

Winner of every major literary award in Taiwan, an elegiac and deceptively quiet novel about love and loss, broken dreams and desolate hearts--and music

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.

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Author: Kuo, Chiang-Sheng
  • ISBN: 9781956763416
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 8.25 x 0.39
  • Number Of Pages: 144
  • Publication Year: 2023
Language: English

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