The Piano Tuner

A Novel
A bestseller and 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
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.

Contributor: Howard Goldblatt (Translated by), Sylvia Li-chun Lin (Translated by)

Translator: Howard Goldblatt, Sylvia Li-chun Lin

Pages: 168

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