Taiwanese Author’s English Debut is a Musical Journey of Self-Discovery
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Loading... - Boram Choi
- 09 Feb 2023
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This bestseller and winner of every major literary award in Taiwan is a poignant novel about love and loss, broken dreams and desolate hearts — and music.
The Piano Tuner by Chiang-Sheng Kuo
Anyone with enough experience can make up stories, but only those who truly understand the world have something meaningful to say.”
That quote, from a Nobel literature laureate, is used by a nameless piano tuner to describe what defines for him a widower grieving for his young wife in The Piano Tuner (Arcade), a novel by Taiwanese author Chiang-Sheng Kuo and his first published in English that will remind readers of Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Haruki Murakami.
This bestseller and winner of every major literary award in Taiwan, translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Lichun-Lin, is an elegiac novel about love and loss, broken dreams and desolate hearts — and music.
Portrait of a Grieving Piano Tuner
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. 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. Read More…
