The Piano Tuner: A Novel

Description

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.

Chiang-Sheng Kuo ( ) 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.

"An elegant novel, told with restraint and acute perceptions. A delightful read."-Ha Jin "So much is packed into this compact and surprising novel: a complex story of genius, madness, and thwarted desire and, beyond that, a deep exploration of the tension between craft and the pursuit of fame. The Piano Tuner is about more than music-it's about the choices one makes in becoming an artist."-Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island "The Piano Tuner is as meticulous in its excavation of loneliness as it is in its exploration of music. I was completely pulled into the narrative as it peeled back layer after layer, exposing the interiority and secrets of the beguiling piano tuner. This book is a quiet masterpiece."-Dur e Aziz Amna, author of American Fever "A rare masterpiece . . . Kuo has told a spellbinding story about love, obsession, loss, and the inscrutable power of music."-David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University "The Piano Tuner captures subtle and almost inexpressible emotions, calling on the reader to resonate, to hear both the rhythm of the piano and the voice of the heart." Jiao Yuanpu , author of Amusement in Black and White and Hearing Chopin "Implicit but tense, this text is like superb fingering interpreting a lonely and poignant love song. . . . It is a transcendence of novel-writing skills."-OPENBOOK Best Book Prize citation (Taiwan) "[In The Piano Tuner], through the filtering and precipitation of time, love crystallizes yet is restrained. With it comes an equal portion of loneliness, accumulating vastly and released slowly, which is refreshing." Zhu Tian-wen, winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature