Customer Reviews

Appassionata

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The author writes well, so, whatever the fruits of her labor, reading her is not a complete waste of time. However, the plot of this novel too easily and too quickly found itself on the familiar and boring "good versus evil" territory. We already have enough of that on certain TV channels. Definitions of terrorism are complex and largely depending on socio-political context. The book stays away from such murky waters. Here, beauty equals morality which in turn all equals the overall unquestionable goodness of the Western world. The novel was probably thought of as some deeper exploration of world's affairs (with a smart choice of an unknown, "neutral" type of a terrorist such as the Chechen whose sex appeal consists of anger) but the author basically surrendered mid-way and, after spending some 20 pages in an awkward limbo, ended up very flat with something inconclusive, delicately mysterious and vaguely comforting; something like "life will go on, goodness will prevail etc.". Most probably, she simply run out of time and patched up the novel very quickly. Of course, the ingredients for the book were right, but the result is basically disappointing. There is also the overwhelming "grandeur" of ultra-sophisticated vocabulary, which only adds to a slight impression of pretentiousness. More could be achieved by "less".

While I'm a fan of Eva Hoffman, whose "Lost in Translation" blew me away, I was disappointed in this novel. Perhaps, as an amateur pianist myself, I expected too much. But from the start I found it greatly over-written, weighed down rather than soaring with impassioned adjectives and adverbs. Sometimes I felt as if I were reading concert program notes. Also, the characters seemed somewhat unreal, with the female protagonist too abstracted to have made it through life at all and the male love interest too narrowly obsessive to have been attractive.

This was a Christmas gift for my wife, who is a pianist. It arrived in good time and in perfect shape. Regarding the content of the book, it's been very well reviewed. My wife is looking forward to reading it.

From the first page to the last I adored Isabel and more important, understood and identified with her. Though I'm no great artist, I travel a lot more than I care to, and I have met up with the Anzor's of this world as well. I have been in Isabels ecstacy and in her emptiness, and most of all in her space in Marseilles and LA, where she is so alone and yet working through the violence she has seen first hand.

So, I loved "Apassionata" even more than my favorite "Lost in Translation," and will confess utter confusion that more here didn't also love Eva Hoffman's masterpiece. I mean she gets it all about our times from the various places in Europe to the surfers in LA, from the politesse of the dinner parties to the concrete hatred of her lover--I feel like this is one of those great books that is either under-appreciated or else not read in the way it is meant.

Not liking my tone here, I just want to say how much language plays a part of my love for this and Hoffman's other books, for example, during her first pages her "Images skivvy through her mind.." or "Ahead, the aleatory sequence of the citiees"..."...maybe there is something hard about her life, in a late-capitalist way." "Bourgeois heroism... the acrobatics of being...

Isabel's life as a traveling pianist how Eva Hoffman so gets the interiority of performance, that delight, and the aftermath: "She's beginning to feel a familiar desolation comng on, the arid ghost of the performance. She has been in plenitude and has been rapidly ejected... her descent from intoxication." I do not know why but all of Isabel's experience as a performer and as a lover and as someone so profoundly betrayed, all spoke to my soul and thank god for Peter, to whom I always felt she would come home.

Thank you, Eva Hoffman for this masterpiece. May many know the joys herein.