In The Piano Tuner by Chiang-Sheng Kuo, a love of music shines through a hard shell of loneliness and lost dreams.
Location: Taiwan and US
The Piano Tuner synopsis
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.
Book review
The past disappears like snow in summer, like time passing, like words disappearing without a trace and people dying without leaving their mark on the world. The tuner speaks of the mesmerizing ability to forge sounds and of other sounds in the world that move people. His thoughts about making an instrument and a musician share the same frequency also lead to thoughts about frequency vibrations between two souls. Tuning a piano for a pianist is like marriage mediation; it requires skill to match a person and a piano.
Falling without words
The tuner often talks about Rachmaninoff’s Song Without Words, and I understand why it reminds him of something falling around him. The way he lives his life is influenced by his upbringing: piano lessons did not quite fit his parents’ view on education. He and Lin san are the narrators of the book, and they alternate frequently and without warning. Lin san clings to his memories, and he wants the sound of his deceased wife’s piano to reflect that, even if it damages the hammers, while the tuner wonders whether you should tune an instrument to reflect its original timbre, to honor a sound etched in memory or to fit a changed person.
(My) thoughts
Not all thoughts the piano tuner shares “fit” him as a person. I was disappointed by the interesting and beautiful thoughts that are expressed in a single sentence and not explored further. They are isolated rather than incorporated into the story. Or is this how the author illustrates that dreams are not meant to be pursued any further? That they are like your conscience: a sincere melody in your heart rather than something you carry out?
The “happy days” of the piano tuner are over; what remains are lost dreams. “The distance between me and excellence at the moment was that I too am disgusted with myself. That’s all.” This quote describes the vibe the book left me with. The Piano Tuner exhibits loneliness, like a life dragging on past its expiration date. It suits the narrators, but falls out of tune with the beauty of the music that is mentioned. I have read more inspiring, upbeat and philosophical books than this one.
After the quote, the story continues with a piano tuner’s kind of hell. The joy he feels at this kind of hell says it all. His actions, including those in the closing paragraph, illustrate the way he chose to live his life as a result of his upbringing and environment. Does this make it a good book? For me, the piano tuner was not the person whose thoughts I wanted to share this week.
Interested?
Buy your copy of The Piano Tuner from Amazon (available 3 January 2023).
Book details
Title: The Piano Tuner
Author: Chiang-Sheng Kuo
Translators (from Chinese): Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin
Language: English
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Arcade
Pages: 168
ISBN (13): 9781956763416
Publication date: 3 January 2023
About the author and translator
Chiang-Sheng Kuo (郭強生) is one of the most exciting storytellers and prose stylists in Taiwanese literature today, He has written a number of novels, essay collections, and plays, of which The Piano Tuner is the first to be published in English. The Piano Tuner was a bestseller and swept every major literary award in Taiwan, including the 2021 United Daily Literature Award, 2020 Taiwan Literature Golden Award, and 2020 Openbook Book of the Year Award as well as other honors. Chiang-Sheng Kuo earned a PhD in drama from New York University and teaches in the Department of Language and Creative Writing at National Taipei University of Education. He lives in Taipei.
Howard Goldblatt translates Chinese fiction from China and Taiwan, including Nobel Prize–winner Mo Yan, five of whose works are published by Arcade (The Garlic Ballads; The Republic of Wine; Big Breasts and Wide Hips; Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out; Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh). He has also translated works by Chiang-Sheng Kuo (The Piano Tuner) and Liu Zhenyun (I Did Not Kill My Husband; The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon; Remembering 1942, all with Sylvia Li-chun Lin and published by Arcade). He taught Chinese literature and culture for more than a quarter of a century. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado.
Sylvia Li-chun Lin, a former teacher and scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, is a full-time translator and writer. She and Howard Goldblatt live in Lafayette, Colorado, with their demonic cat, Domino.
Many thanks to Skyhorse Publishing and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
