The Piano Student by
Lea Singer
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
The author of this book took a few letters between esteemed pianist
Vladimir Horowitz and his student, Nico Kaufmann, and turned them into a
novel about their relationship in the 1930s. According to other sources
like
Horowitz,
Horowitz adamantly denied he was gay, and this book suggests several
reasons for that claim. He was living in Germany in the 1930s but saw
the writing on the wall and relocated to Switzerland, and according to
Singer many known homosexual musicians got married in a hurry to deny
such accusations. Horowitz, referred to in the novel as Volodya, marries
Wanda, who is the daughter of Toscanini. This is during one of the
periods in time where Volodya stopped performing in public.
I
love Horowitz and when I was studying the piano music of Chopin,
Scriabin, Beethoven and Brahms in college, I listened to him frequently
for tone and interpretation. He's really quite amazing and also
unpredictable. The publisher of this book has actually put together two
playlists of the pieces mentioned, and really how could you ever read
this book without listening to the music, it's so essential to the
story. (It's available in
Spotify and
YouTube.) From a musical interactivity standpoint, I give this book all the stars.
But
I found some of the authorial decisions confusing and it made for a
difficult reading experience. The entire story is told by Kaufmann as an
older man to a random guy he meets in a bar, who up until that moment
was going to commit suicide. I never understood why he was in the story
at all. But it removes the story itself and turns it into an info dump, a
narrated road trip, a slide show. The moments where Kaufmann and
Horowitz are described in the room together have great energy, and the
mention of confrontations with WANDA are exhilarating, but the majority
of the novel is a summary of those moments. The dialogue is unmarked
which gets very confusing, and I couldn't always tell if the words were
coming from the two talking about the previous events or the people
within those events.
It's clear the author is a historian and
did a lot of research; I would have like to know more about that
research, including which parts of the story are factual and which are
manufactured to make it a good story. Am I encountering historical
characters or a novelization of a romance that someone wished for? We
can't know everything for sure but what DO we really know? Are the
letters mentioned transcriptions of the actual letters or imagined
versions? I just don't think that calling something a novel gives the
author an excuse not to more clearly delineate fact vs. fiction when
it's about someone who lived until 1989. You can read a shortened
version of his amazing life in his
obituary in the New York Times.
I
received a copy of this book from the publisher through Edelweiss; it
comes out October 6, 2020. I recommend it for anyone but especially
those of you who like novels with music themes, you know who you are.
View all my reviews
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
