The Piano Teacher: A Novel
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- ISBN13: 9780143116530
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
“A rare and exquisite tale…Transports you out of time, out of place, into a world you can feel on your very skin.” -Elizabeth Gilbert
In the sweeping tradition of The English Uncomplaining, Janice Y.K. Lee’s debut novel is a tale of like and treachery set in war-torn Hong Kong. In 1942, Englishman Will Truesdale falls hastily into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a gorgeous Eurasian socialite. But their affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world. Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong to work as a piano teacher and also starts a fateful affair. As the threads of this spellbinding novel intertwine, impossible choices emerge-between like and safety, courage and survival, the present, and above all, the past.
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The book was ordered on June 4th and charged to my credit card on June 4th. It was noted that the book was in stock. But, it was not shipped until June 10th and not received until 27th, two days after a book club meeting to chat about the book. Will never order another book from the seller.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
There is much to like in a book that appropriates a cinematic swath of the not-too-distant past and brings it into sharp focus. Why, then, does Janet Y. K. Lee’s first novel The Piano Teacher (Viking, 2009) place an unsettled and incomplete aftertaste?
Despite the leader’s seemingly glamorous recent background, she pulls no punches in delivering grim accounts of tortured lives lived beneath the conquering Japanese. These landmines of agony (based mostly upon past fact) are saved for later in this tale — a tale so slow to take flight that it’s tempting to set this book aside for one better steered. But patience is its own reward, in this case delivered in the form of World War II’s colonial Asian horror, and two romances. The romances are set apart by a decade but unified by geography and a common, curiously impassive like interest, Englishman Will Truesdale. What Trudy and Claire see in Will’s typically distant, sometimes hurt sensibilities is, if not mysterious, untold. (Perhaps he was more handsome than the leader is willing to write, though Lee’s powers of description are regularly strongest when describing faces, bodies and clothing).
“A few weeks later, she questioned, ‘Why me?’
‘Why anyone?’ he answered. ‘Why is anyone with anyone?’
Desire, proximity, habit, chance. All these went through her mind, but she didn’t say a word.
‘I don’t like to like,’ he said. ‘You should be forewarned. I don’t judge in it. And you shouldn’t either.’”
There’s a conscious and mostly successful attempt to paint Hong Kong as the background insinuating itself subtly into the foreground. When this succeeds, the result highlights the tale’s cinematic canvas.
“Dominick is one of persons queer Chinese who are more English than the English, yet has no fantastic like for them. Educated in them most precious way in England, he has come back to Hong Kong and is affronted by everything that is in the least bit crass — which is to say, everything — the swill on the streets, the expectorating, illiterate throngs of coolies and fishmongers.”
When less successful, the narration seems lifted from a period travel piece. Interspersed between the upper class chit chat, gossip and internment camp negotiations are stark descriptions that will shock you to sudden attention.
“A young woman, Mary Cox, says her spouse was grabbed by Japanese soldiers and made to clean up after bodies had been dragged along the street, shedding body parts like animals. They had to clear all the bodies before they got in the water supply and spread disease. He came home soaked in blood and bits of decaying flesh and wept before falling on the sofa, exhausted. He was gone the next morning. She hasn’t seen him since.”
As the tale unfolds, the reader must keep track of evolving plot threads and also adapt to style shifts. These shifts take the form of shorter segments rather than the full conventional chapters (e.g., the chapter labeled “1943″), which have the flavor of characters’ journal entries blown up into fleeting tale fragments. This later style might well have worked better throughout, since the style alternates between 50’s and 40’s scenes. As a replacement for when they do appear later in the book, it’s a curious shift that compounds the temporal switchbacks that have occurred throughout.
Then there is the matter of the book’s title. Right, the principal narrator is piano teacher Claire, but despite references to childhood practice, Claire’s tie to composition is coincidental. As a replacement for her teaching sessions with the daughter of a well-off family tree, Accessory, are memorable for her interactions with household staff, descriptions of food and clothing, and abstractedly hinted-at dark moments from the past. Composition plays no role in this; in fact, much later, when Claire is questioned to play for a group of adults, she is desperate to find a way to avoid playing. You will not be alone if you end The Piano Teacher lacking a single lingering melody.
This may have been as proposed. The character who is “trying to become invisible, so that she will be all the more visible around Will” dimly senses that her skill as a pianist is a sort of deformity, not unlike Will’s limp from a wartime injury. But this doesn’t clarify why the skill that gives her entree into the central plot becomes the role agreed billboard status for the novel. Writ large, it’s as though the novel’s wartime privations become a power for dissociation and confusion in which Lee’s prose is complicit.
A passage representative of this discipline describes a loyal amah who followed a family tree after they had been interned during the war. She brought them food and supplies into the camp in a large picnic basket. Because she had known them from childhood, she brought food every week:
“‘. . . until one week she had not appeared. The day after she was to have come, the family tree received the same picnic basket. Inside was a tiny hand, wrapped in dirty towels. ‘They thought it was a amusing joke. Of course’, [Will] said, ‘the truly sadistic Japanese were the exception, but they were all we could reflect about and all we ever remember. We never knew what happened, whether she had offended a name or done something incorrect or was just in the incorrect place at the incorrect time.’
The tale was his apology. She knew he didn’t owe him one. This was how she knew his affection.”
The narration ends there, and moves impassively on to clarify the couple’s arrival at Macau Station and a arresting portrait of a administrator, “with mustache and white hat.” The reader is swept along in such eddies of helplessness, of disorder dissolving into surface order.
The Piano Teacher succeeds in drawing parallels between the fateful directions taken in the affairs and the fate that befell Hong Kong after the Japanese occupation. But because its characters are themselves not permanently capable of building sense of what has befallen them, the book lacks a certain clairvoyance of purpose, or at least enlightened telling of the adversities.
One is tempted to point to stereotypes of Asian cultural passivity, a much-decried Western cliche to clarify this, but a more plausible explanation (especially considering that the leader is Asian herself) is surely that Lee’s characters are too much a part of the landscape that envelopes them: like narrator Claire’s self-avowed chameleon-ism, allowing fate to wash over them, long-suffering it with lament, wry comment, disdain, or simply striving to look yet to be to the normalcy that it’s hoped will befall them just as surely. Perhaps the stereotype belies a more careful interpretation. William James wrote in “Varieties of Religious Experience” :
“When, for example, Achilles, about to kill Lycaon, Priam’s young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:
‘Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos too is dead, who was better far than thou…. Over me too hang death and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite, or arrow from the string.’ *
* Iliad, XXI., E. Myers’s translation.
Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy’s neck with his sword, heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to eat the white stout of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy each ring right, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire.”
Lee leaves convincing traces of a deeper, if calmly laconic, insight. “So that’s how it goes, [Will] thinks. That’s the beginning of how it all changes. We become survivors or not.” And later:
“The reunion is sweet, the late afternoon sun slanting through the window, the flat horizon of the sea and the boats floating in the harbor, and Trudy, right here, right next to him. He has thought of her for so long, missed the feel of her skin and the smell of her breath, that he moves as if he’s in a dream, She is silent, more than usual, and seems skittish. They are both too worn out, too thirsty, to ever be quenched by something as mundane as the physical.”
But wait — this is Will, who has done small to earn his place in the hearts of the women he was typically at pains to aver he did not like. Whether betrayed by him, or simply wounded by his stubbornness, Trudy deserves more. His additional lover, the adulterous but increasingly sympathetic Claire seems to wander through the plot looking for her own denouement; when it comes as an anticlimactic exit, some readers won’t care, or find the exit to be a cynical symbol of the character’s failure to carry a greater burden of the tale.
At times this is lovely work, drawn in pastels of a fateful stillness. Perhaps Lee’s next canvas will be equally broad, taking from a history no less rich, no less stark, but wielding a sharper brush, filling out characters capable of building just a small more sense of what they experience.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Received my “The Piano”. I had to order two so was pleased that the seller had two available. I am also permanently looking for a seller whom is closest geographically to me. I live in Ca and have noticed most the sellers are on the East Coast. Sometimes I am in a hasten and don’t want to wait the extra couple of days. I appreciate when the sellers list which state they are from.
Thanks
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
The writing in this book was lacking detail and imagination. It seemed primary a path to explore empty, self-serving people of the upper class. I was very disappointed with the quality of the plot and writing.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
The Piano Teacher is sure to be one of the most talked about books of 2009. New leader Janice Y. K. Lee will be one of the highly praised writers of the decade. The Piano Teacher is impossible to place down. We loved this tale of like, treachery, history and redemption.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5