The Piano Man’s Daughter [Audiobook, CD, Abridged] [Audio CD]

Timothy Findley (Author), Colm Feore (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0864922574 | ISBN-13: 978-0864922571 | Edition: No edition

The Piano Man’s Daughter is the tale of people who dream in songs — two Irish immigrant families facing a new and uncertain future in turn-of-the-century Toronto. Narrated by Charlie Kilworth, whose birth is an echo of his mother’s own illegitimate beginnings, The Piano Man’s Daughter is the lyrical, multi-layered tale of Charlie’s mother, Lily, his grandmother Ede, and their family. Lily is a woman pursued by her own demons, “making off with the matches just when the fire’s caught hold,” a beautiful, mad genius, first introduced as she sings in her mother’s belly. Conceived when her mother falls in love with a musician, Lily is born in a field of flowers and grows into an odd, lonely child. As she matures, she becomes more and more alienated from real life, but this doesn’t keep her from having a brief, mysterious affair while she’s a student in wartime England. The result is Charlie, who has perfect pitch and a high tolerance for his mother’s eccentricities. As Lily sinks deeper into madness, her once gentle nature is affected by the dark demons that inhabit her troubled mind. It is only after her death that Charlie, always Lily’s protector and caretaker, is able to tell her story through loving but honest eyes, finding catharsis and hope in the painful but revealing process.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As the story opens, Lily, the heroine of Timothy Findley's Victorian-Gothic-style novel as seen through the narrative of her son Charlie, is ending her days in an asylum; her life unfolds as a Dickensian tale of deprivation and struggle between the feminine and the coldly masculine, leading to that "madwoman in the attic" denouement. Yet Charlie is reclaiming his mother's life through his loving telling of her story. "She could break your heart with that riveting gaze," he says. Music, vaudeville, and silent movies resonate through the lives in the novel, set in turn-of-the-century Toronto. Findley is a best-selling and award-winning Canadian writer, author of The Wars and Famous Last Words. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In the genus Novelist, there are several subspecies, including writer, teacher and storyteller. Findley is a storyteller. Winner of numerous honors (including Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction, for The Wars), he is no spinner of wonderful words but, rather, an extraordinarily gifted teller of tales. As in his several other novels (most recently, Headhunter), here he imagines very particular, not at all common, folk. The focus is on Lily, who spends most of her brief life around the turn of the century touched by a hybrid of epilepsy, insanity and grace. Lily is conceived upon the first and only meeting of her mother, Ede, with an angelic traveling piano salesman named Tom; though fully intending to marry Ede, he dies "in a sea of horses" months before Lily's birth. Within a few years, Ede marries Tom's older brother and transforms into a proper, run-of-the-mill urban matriarch. Before long, Lily's condition is discovered. She is first locked in the attic whenever guests arrive, then sent off to a school for "different" girls?but not before she falls for a reasonable facsimile of her father, a Cinderella-like boy/man, nicknamed Lizzie, who is the much younger brother of Lily's father. Before the novel's end, Lizzie dies as well, as does another Tom, raising the only real problem in this otherwise wholly involving work: that the good too predictably die young. By way of extremely close interior perambulations through his characters in the mind and voice of Lily's son, Charlie, Findley views the image of the general through the lens of the particular, offering everything a reader could want from a vaguely romantic multigenerational saga. Film rights to Whoopi Goldberg.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: BTC Audiobooks; No edition edition (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0864922574
• ISBN-13: 978-0864922571
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,520,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tribute to the song of life, July 14, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Piano Man's Daughter (Hardcover)

In this beautifully written and captivating novel, Canadian author, Timothy Findley, affirms that life is a magnificent and mysterious blending of our past, present and future. In fact, as Charlie, the narrator of the novel, discovers, the past teaches us how to live in the present and plan for the future. His mother, Lily, whose entrance into the world and whose place in the world are both unconventional, shares her wisdom with her son as they seek to discover the identity of Charlie's father. Although deemed mad by most of her socially conscious family and acquaintances, and often mistreated because of that, Charlie knows that despite her weaknesses, the wisdom Lily shares with him defies madness. The daughter of a piano man, Lily has a profound understanding of the meaning of music. She teaches her son that all living creatures share a song and that song must be passed on to others. "That song--those songs are just the same as what I was telling you about the ants. This is me, they say. This is you. This is us. All songs pass from one to another--the songs of ten thousand years of nesting together--of being one--of being us...We and the small stream burgeoning out of the storm and the stars above the field and the sky with its endless curving. Us. Us. Us, they said. We're singing. Us. This was my mother's teaching. I received it then--but I had no notion until her death of its potency. Pass it on, she had said. Pass it on." Only after his mother frees herself from the confines of a lunatic asylum and finally finds her ultimate safe place, does Charlie understand the importance of the song and the duty and privilege that is his to pass it on, despite the uncertainties and fears that often accompany the song. In The Piano Man's Daughter, Findley encourages all of us to listen carefully for the song of life, to appreciate all of the singers, and to lift our own voices as we pass on the hauntingly beautiful melody

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the mystery and dread of fatherhood, June 17, 2004

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The piano man's daughter (Hardcover)

The winner of numerous awards, Canadian author Findley shapes this 1996 novel around a young man's quest for his father and his dread of becoming a father himself.

Narrator Charlie Kilworth is the son of mad, beautiful, evervescent and tormented Lily Kilworth, who cannot or will not remember who Charlie's father is. It is her story Charlie tells, after her death in an asylum fire, a fire she may herself have set.

Lily's story begins before her birth, when her mother, Ede, meets an itinerant piano man. "The sight of him was like a match being struck," Ede recalls, beginning the incendiary allusions that punctuate the novel and haunt Lily's private world.

The piano man dies before he can wed Ede but eight years later she marries his brother, Frederick, an ambitious piano manufacturer whose one unorthodoxy is falling in love with Ede. He accepts Lily but without knowing of her affliction - severe epileptic seizures.

He is as repelled by Lily's epilepsy as Ede is frightened by it and becomes, for Lily, the demon of her childhood, the focus of rebellion and despair. But even though Frederick locks her in the attic whenever company is expected and finally banishes her to a school for difficult girls, Lily blossoms.

A beautiful, vibrant young woman, "hampered" not "handicapped" (the word makes her indignant) by her illness, she goes to England with a friend and it's there that Charlie is conceived. He knows only that the event occurred in January 1910 and he examines Lily's photos intently, imagining fathers, and questions her friends, adding pieces to the life she has already related to him.

Lily and Charlie return to Toronto before World War I but Frederick, outraged by Charlie's birth, refuses to see them. They begin a round of living in expensive hotels, going to dances where Charlie is always her partner, and seeing movies. For Charlie the life is a series of enchantments and nightmares as his mother's demons pursue her and drag him along. A child, he learns to watch over his mother although his dependency often renders him helpless.

When tragedy pushes Lily over the edge into madness, Charlie is liberated into normalcy - school, friends his own age, relatives. "It made a decent life - secure in ways I had never known." Lily emerges from the asylum but never permanently.

Charlie's voice is wistful, awed, admiring, impatient, petulant and wise. But it is Lily who colors and shapes the story, taking flight from her son's narration. Findley's writing is deeply atmosheric, enveloping the reader in the Canada of 1890 to 1920. He invites an intimacy with his characters (many not even touched on here) that creates a bond without violating their essential human secrecy.

A rewarding novel, which will linger in the mind.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars interesting but lengthy, January 30, 2006

By 

N. Reilly "booklover" (Midwest) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Piano Man's Daughter (Paperback)

This writer is very adept at describing surroundings and different characters. I liked the story very much and yet I felt he left out key emotional responses to huge shifts in Lily's life. It is an interesting book and I was sad when it ended but I felt it would have been enhanced by more in-depth emotional descriptions.