Daniel Mason - The Piano Tuner (ENGELSTALIG)
(Picador)
ISBN 0330492691
uitgave uit 2004
356 pp paperback
(zo goed als nieuw!)
Staat van het boek: 9.0

In October 1886, piano tuner Edgar Drake receives an astonishing request from the War Office. He is asked to go to Burma to tune the Erard piano of Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll, to whom the office is much indebted for keeping the peace in the remote and restless Shan States. Drake accepts the assignment and launches on a journey of self-discovery that takes him from London to Calcutta to Rangoon and, with the help of a mysterious Burmese woman named Khin Myo, to the compound of the formidable Dr. Carroll himself. Yes, he successfully tunes the piano and even plays a concert for visiting dignitaries he chooses Bach's immortal Well-Tempered Clavier, reasoning that it has universal application but Drake finds that he cannot leave. He is altered by the beauty of the place, slowly opening himself to Khin Myo, and caught up in Carroll's machinations, which may or may not be seditious. It ends, inevitably, in tragedy, but the reader will regret that it ends at all. This is an utterly involving first novel, rich in historical detail and as lulling as Burma itself. Mason's language is at once tropically lush and as precise as a Bach prelude. A novel for readers of literary and popular fiction alike; highly recommended.Recensie(s)Engrossing ... the reader falls under the spell that the author is weaving, surrendering to the story's exotic magic The Times Remarkable ... a novel that immerses the reader in a distant world with startling immediacy and ardor -- Michiko Kakutani New York Times A virtuoso tale, cast in the Burmese colonial wars of the 1880s ... Mason [adds] a depth of quirky historical knowledge and a feel for the brutal politics of colonialism, to create a complex and subtly imagined adventure ... with echoes of other books: Heart of Darkness, of course, and A Handful of Dust ... a highly dextrous and involving performance Observer Intriguing and alluring ... those strange images of Europe meeting the east, of the east engulfing Europe, linger like a haunting tune Guardian An ambitious, adventuresome, highly unusual first novel that offers pleasures too rarely encountered in contemporary American literary fiction ... [Mason is] a gifted, original and courageous writer Washington Post Luminous ... Mason's writing achieves that kind of reverie in which every vision, tone, flavor and sensation is magnified Los Angeles Times

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