Appassionata

By Eva Hoffman

Book Overview

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 intensity 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 her lover's 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590514572
• ISBN13: 9781590514573
• Release Date: May 2011
• Publisher: Other Press, LLC
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Ecstasy

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.

Verbally Appassionata

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.