Appassionata [Hardcover]

Eva Hoffman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 5, 2009

Selected as one of Oprah.com’s 20 Tantalizing Beach Reads
Selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Isabel Merton is a renowned concert pianist, whose performances are marked by a rare responsiveness to the complexities of her art, and its intensities of feeling. At the height of her career, she feels increasingly torn between the compelling musical realm she deeply inhabits, and her fragmented itinerant artist’s life, with its frequent flights, anonymous hotels, and brief, arbitrary encounters. Away from her New York home on a European tour, Isabel meets a political exile from a war-torn country, a man driven by a rankling sense of injustice and a powerful desire to vindicate his cause and avenge his people. As their paths cross in several cities, they are drawn to each other both by their differences and their seemingly parallel passions–until a menacing incident throws her into a creative crisis, and forces her to reevaluate his actions, and her own motives. In this story of contemporary love and conflict, Hoffman illuminates the currents and undercurrents of our time, as she explores the luminous and dark faces of romanticism, and those perennial human yearnings, frustrations, and moral choices that can lead to destructiveness, or the richest art. 

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. As a child, Hoffman studied piano and dreamed of performing professionally until she redirected her ambition toward writing; here she wields her expertise in both with dazzling success. Acclaimed American pianist Isabel Merton, on tour in Europe, becomes romantically entangled with Anzor Islikhanov, a semiofficial representative of Chechnya who follows her around Europe. They are both enthralled to personal passions—hers for music, his for his ravaged country—and their relationship intensifies with thrilling inevitability as a Chechen radical leader (with whom Anzor is not-so-secretly sympathetic) manipulates Anzor's allegiance to his homeland and drives a wedge between him and Isabel. Hoffman's prose is reliably gorgeous, and while the narrative lends itself nicely to sharp commentary and observations on politics, power and the role of the United States in a changing world, what's memorable is the way Hoffman maps the intersection of art, history and man's striving for meaning. (May)
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From The New Yorker

This unconventional novel follows the parallel passions of Isabel Merton, a renowned concert pianist, and Anzor Islikhanov, a Chechen political exile driven by a powerful desire to avenge his people, with whom she becomes involved. Anzor is a frankly unappealing character, whose interminable lectures are a reminder that terrorists make for uncomfortable dinner parties. “You think if you say a few nice things over dinner . . . that reprieves you from everything,” he tells a well-meaning American. Of more interest is Hoffman’s way of writing about music—a kind of blank verse, endowed with striking lyrical intensity. A description of Isabel’s performance of a Rachmaninoff Prelude notes “the build-up, the chords, ranged, arranged, like a cathedral, mountains, elements / larger than us, in excess of what we are.”
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Other Press; 1 edition (May 5, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590513193
• ISBN-13: 978-1590513194
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #374,483 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Perfervid prose, overwrought and overdone, August 1, 2009

By 

Tick Pyne "wirefox79" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Appassionata (Hardcover)

I love Eva Hoffman's writing and always approach a new work of hers with tremendous optimism and curiosity. This one, however, let me down badly. I found that most or all of the main characters were so tedious, unlikable and uninteresting, that it mattered not what happened to them or even why. Hoffman's prose in this book is also quite over the top and she really should have a dictionary at the back if she is determined to pepper her story with so many words not found in most of our vocabulary. Susurrus? Juddering? Aleatory? Acedia? All in a very few pages? I went to college and my IQ is more than my shoe size and my vocabulary respectable, but when a writer is more interested in showing off with words than with what they're actually saying or why or how, she's lost me. It is also worth noting here, I think, that for all of Hoffman's highfalutin' words, she manages to repeatedly refer to Fairway, the famous vegetable and fruit store on Broadway's Upper West Side, as The Fairway, which it is not. A bit more attention to details and characters might have improved this book and a bit less effort at being, well, sesquipedalian.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars What is the Value of Art in a World Torn Apart By Violence?, June 1, 2009

By 

L. Young "palmtree2000" (West Orange, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Appassionata (Hardcover)

Isabel Merton is a famous concert pianist recently separated from her law professor husband. On a concert tour of Euope she becomes involved with an enigmatic Chechen by the name of Anzor Islikhanov. As their relationship deepens she will be drawn closer to the violently righteous anger sitting beneath Anzor's surface, and the painful history of his war-torn country. As she becomes more and more aware of the possibility that Anzor is a terrorist she begins to question the value of music in a world biesieged by violence. This causes a crisis of conscience for Isabel. What are the responsibilities of the powerful and the powerless. What value does the artist have?

Through the intimacy of Isabel and Anzor's relationship large and very relevant issues are explored. However, the problem with the novel is that it is written with such opacity of style that we are distanced from the characters and lose interest. Other than Isabel, all the characters in the novel are one dimensional, some even stereotypical. Aside from a glimmer of Anzor's smoldering sexuality it is difficult to see what about him appeals to Isabel. This is definitely a novel for the patient reader as it is often repetitive and slow moving.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ecstasy, September 10, 2009

By 

Santiago Lafcadio - See all my reviews

This review is from: Appassionata (Hardcover)

Appassionata (a much better title than its original, published-in-the-UK Illuminations) is a wonderful art-meets-life story in which art triumphs, however wounded may be the artist by what the author calls "the larger futility." Isabel learns "to give homage to the world not for its goodness, but for its Being." It's the least, and also the most, anyone can do. When the artist confronts the brutality of everyday political life, she has a choice: play (create) or retreat. Isabel does retreat, which makes her re-emergence into life all the more satisfying. This novel ends where it begins (in an airport) and yet travels not only the world (Europe) but also through the mind and heart of one of the great depictions of a performing artist in fiction.

As for the writing (about which other readers have complained), it's like confronting Chopin and Schumann in prose. For some, yes, overblown; for others, ecstasy.