Description: 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.
Brief description: 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. A resident of Taipei, he 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.