My Rating: 3 stars
I don't remember how this book got onto my radar, as I'm not as familiar with Taiwanese literature as I am with Hong Kong literature, but seeing that this was a short novella, I decided to pick it up last minute as a way to round out my January reads.
Overall, this was a good story, but a bit confusing and hard to follow. The structure was a nonlinear one that jumped back and forth in time, which normally wouldn't be too much of a problem, but this one also happened to jump back and forth between first person and third person narrative voice as well (a few times, it jumped to second person too, which completely baffled me) — both of these things combined, along with the lack of distinctive breaks between the narration, plus lyrical prose that bordered on abstract in some places, made this an unnecessarily exhausting and tedious read. The entire story was narrated by the eponymous piano tuner, but presented in snippets of his thoughts that seemed to run together jumbled between his past and current lives, making it difficult to truly understand what was going on at times with the story.
It also didn't help that the ending was very abrupt — the type of ending that seemed to stop in the middle of a thought — to the point that I thought perhaps I was missing a few pages of the book (which, thinking about it now, is still possible, as the version I read was an ARC that I downloaded several months back, which, according to my e-reader, ended at the 99% mark and didn't have any other pages after it, not even an acknowledgments page).
I think this had the potential to be a meaningful, emotionally nuanced story, but the structure and the switching of the voices was too distracting and unfortunately drowned out that part of the story. Perhaps it would've been better for me to read this one in its original language (Chinese) rather than the translated version, as I honestly can't help but feel that maybe something got lost in translation somewhere. While I don't regret reading this one, plus there were actually some elements of it that I really liked (such as the parts where the narrator talks about the piano pieces and the interesting backstories of the artists), the experience overall was underwhelming. If I'm able to find the Chinese version, maybe I'll try that and see if my experience is any different…for now though, this definitely more of a borderline 3 star read for me.
Overall, this was a good story, but a bit confusing and hard to follow. The structure was a nonlinear one that jumped back and forth in time, which normally wouldn't be too much of a problem, but this one also happened to jump back and forth between first person and third person narrative voice as well (a few times, it jumped to second person too, which completely baffled me) — both of these things combined, along with the lack of distinctive breaks between the narration, plus lyrical prose that bordered on abstract in some places, made this an unnecessarily exhausting and tedious read. The entire story was narrated by the eponymous piano tuner, but presented in snippets of his thoughts that seemed to run together jumbled between his past and current lives, making it difficult to truly understand what was going on at times with the story.
It also didn't help that the ending was very abrupt — the type of ending that seemed to stop in the middle of a thought — to the point that I thought perhaps I was missing a few pages of the book (which, thinking about it now, is still possible, as the version I read was an ARC that I downloaded several months back, which, according to my e-reader, ended at the 99% mark and didn't have any other pages after it, not even an acknowledgments page).
I think this had the potential to be a meaningful, emotionally nuanced story, but the structure and the switching of the voices was too distracting and unfortunately drowned out that part of the story. Perhaps it would've been better for me to read this one in its original language (Chinese) rather than the translated version, as I honestly can't help but feel that maybe something got lost in translation somewhere. While I don't regret reading this one, plus there were actually some elements of it that I really liked (such as the parts where the narrator talks about the piano pieces and the interesting backstories of the artists), the experience overall was underwhelming. If I'm able to find the Chinese version, maybe I'll try that and see if my experience is any different…for now though, this definitely more of a borderline 3 star read for me.
Received ARC from Arcade Books via Edelweiss.
No comments:
Post a Comment