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 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?
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.
