5/26/2023 0 Comments Tuner imageHe taught Chinese literature and culture for more than a quarter of a century. 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). 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). 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. 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.Ĭhiang-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. 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. Long hailed in Taiwan as a “writer’s writer,” Chiang-Sheng Kuo delivers a stunningly powerful, compact novel in The Piano Tuner. What betrayal and what heartbreak made him walk away from greatness? In his forties, he is balding and ugly, a loser by any standard. A journey of self-discovery across time and continents, from a dark apartment in Taipei’s red-light district to snow-clad New York.Īt the heart of the story is the nameless narrator, the piano tuner. A piano tuner concealing a lifetime of secrets.
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