Appassionata

by Eva Hoffman

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 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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590513514
Publisher:	Other Press, LLC
Publication date:	05/05/2009
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Eva Hoffman

Eva Hoffman was born in Krakow, Poland, and emigrated to America in her teens. She is the author of Lost in Translation, Exit Into History, Shtetl, The Secret, and After Such Knowledge, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award, and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in London.

Read an Excerpt

His eyes become remote again, his mouth set. He turns away from her, and picks up a jagged stone and throws it, with surprising force, down into the small ravine. A faint sound reaches them, mixed with the unvarying, gurgling water. She follows the movement of his torso as he turns effortlessly with the extension of the throwing arm. Line of beauty, she thinks, line of grace. . . . The casual arc of the throwing arm seems to slow into a timelessness; and suddenly, as if in concert with the elongated curve, she feels a surge of longing so sudden and powerful that she’s afraid she’ll fall from it, that her chest will cave
in as from a blow.

Anzor’s eyes return to her, still occluded, still looking into another distance; then they gather toward a more focused light. His face is for a moment fully unmasked, and he directs at her a stare that takes her in with a kind of encompassing ferocity. She stares back. He is very near and at a great distance. She knows nothing about this man, except the sudden power of his presence. A line of attraction and danger seems to vibrate between them in a tense ostinato. She feels she could travel a long way along that line, beyond the dark glow of his gaze, and into whatever lies within. For a moment, their eyes lock.

Then the moment is over, and they start walking back to the car. On the way down the winding road, they talk politely, as people who are getting acquainted talk.

Reading Group Guide

1. Does Isabel feel her life of “bourgeois heroism” (Page 5) and global travel to be somehow lacking? What do you think her malaise is about?

2. Ernest Wolfe is from an old world while Jane is from a new one. How do they contrast? How does music bridge their very different views of life? (Pages 103, 108, 150)

3. Compare Isabel and her husband Peter. How does Isabel think of him? Why does she leave him?

4. Anzor’s rage at the unjust treatment of the people of Chechnya has no bounds. How doe he manifest his rage? Do his feelings and some of his observations seem justified? At times Isabel agrees with him but she later begins to lose respect for him. Is Isabel naïve? Is Anzor?

5. The bombing, what Isabel calls “anti-music” (Page 298) throws her into a sea of doubts about art and meaning. How is she able to reawaken from this state of despair?

6. Ernest Wolfe says in his memoir, “I have also studied death. I come after….I was the child who ate death for breakfast. Only that ground is true, all the rest is ornament. Whatever sounds of pity and praise I find must rise up, however improbably, out of that. (Pages 87-88) Compare this with Anzor’s reaction to injustice and death.

7. In an interview Isabel is asked if it is arrogant to believe that European classical music expresses timeless and universal values. Isabel responds that it must not be since people all over the world want to listen to it. How does Appassionata illuminate the universality of music?

8. What does Anzor’s story about his father’s killing of his dog say about his conflicts between hate and love? What does it say about forgiveness?

9. Anzor shows a tremendous sensitivity about honor and respect and equates his rage with self-respect. Does his portrayal help you understand how this could turn into extreme violence? Can you imagine different ways to react to the indignities that he feels his people have suffered?

10. When Anzor says he loved his dog Isabel realizes she has never heard him use the word love except for his country. He had emphasized his feelings for his country over any individuals, including his family and friends. How does his nationalism affect his capacity for love?

11. When Isabel reflects on her relationship with Anzor, she realizes that “part of her has been poured into him, and part of him is now within her” (Page 183). How do parts of Azor show themselves in Isabel after the bombing?

Foreword

1. Does Isabel feel her life of “bourgeois heroism” (Page 5) and global travel to be somehow lacking? What do you think her malaise is about?

2. Ernest Wolfe is from an old world while Jane is from a new one. How do they contrast? How does music bridge their very different views of life? (Pages 103, 108, 150)

3. Compare Isabel and her husband Peter. How does Isabel think of him? Why does she leave him?

4. Anzor’s rage at the unjust treatment of the people of Chechnya has no bounds. How doe he manifest his rage? Do his feelings and some of his observations seem justified? At times Isabel agrees with him but she later begins to lose respect for him. Is Isabel naïve? Is Anzor?

5. The bombing, what Isabel calls “anti-music” (Page 298) throws her into a sea of doubts about art and meaning. How is she able to reawaken from this state of despair?

6. Ernest Wolfe says in his memoir, “I have also studied death. I come after….I was the child who ate death for breakfast. Only that ground is true, all the rest is ornament. Whatever sounds of pity and praise I find must rise up, however improbably, out of that. (Pages 87-88) Compare this with Anzor’s reaction to injustice and death.

7. In an interview Isabel is asked if it is arrogant to believe that European classical music expresses timeless and universal values. Isabel responds that it must not be since people all over the world want to listen to it. How does Appassionata illuminate the universality of music?

8. What does Anzor’s story about his father’s killing of his dog say about his conflicts between hate and love? What does itsay about forgiveness?

9. Anzor shows a tremendous sensitivity about honor and respect and equates his rage with self-respect. Does his portrayal help you understand how this could turn into extreme violence? Can you imagine different ways to react to the indignities that he feels his people have suffered?

10. When Anzor says he loved his dog Isabel realizes she has never heard him use the word love except for his country. He had emphasized his feelings for his country over any individuals, including his family and friends. How does his nationalism affect his capacity for love?

11. When Isabel reflects on her relationship with Anzor, she realizes that “part of her has been poured into him, and part of him is now within her” (Page 183). How do parts of Azor show themselves in Isabel after the bombing?

Editorial Reviews

How do the educated citizens of the privileged West understand and respond to the murky wars on their borders? Is it better to be rational and detached on political matters or driven by pure passion - even if that passion is hatred? Eva Hoffman’s eloquent new novel poses these and related questions, while also presenting a nuanced portrait of a musician deeply engaged in the complexities of her art.
—The New York Times

Sylvia Brownrigg

A concert pianist falls for a Chechen nationalist, with disastrous consequences. Better known as a memoirist (After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Aftermath of the Holocaust, 2004, etc.), Hoffman displays in her second novel the same weakness that slightly marred her first (The Secret, 2002): The ideas are frequently better-rounded than the characters. Touring piano star Isabel Merton meets Anzor Islikhanov after a concert in Paris and embarks on a credibility-straining affair with this touchy "representative of the Chechen government." Anzor sees condescension and offenses to his honor everywhere. He exhibits an alarming appetite for revenge against his country's Soviet oppressors and sneering contempt for Westerners, variously dismissed as "self-indulgent . . . spoiled . . . stupid." (It doesn't help that the friends Isabel introduces to him are caricatures of vapid, well-meaning liberals.) He follows Isabel from Brussels to Copenhagen, Vienna, Prague and beyond, improbably taking her along to meetings with a kaffiyeh-clad man who might as well have "terrorist" tattooed across his forehead. The sense of an obtrusive, didactic authorial hand is reinforced by lengthy excerpts from the book Isabel is reading, a memoir by her former teacher Ernst Wolfe (another refugee from disaster who disdains sloppy Westerners), and by her meetings with a fellow Wolfe student who is now a famous cellist-and a stereotypically go-for-the-gusto contrast to sensitive Isabel. Hoffman nearly redeems 200 pages of this irritating build-up in the novel's searing final section after a bomb goes off at Isabel's concert in Barcelona. The pianist is hurled into a spiritual and psychological crisis: Shecan't perform, she can't practice, she can't even listen to music. Echoes of Camus and Dostoevsky reverberate as Isabel wonders what possible meaning art can have in a world beset by violence and hatred. Her reclamation of beauty and discovery of a new passion make for a moving finale. If only it didn't require such long and schematic preparation to get there. Ambitious and elegantly written, but seriously overdetermined.

Kirkus Reviews

The New York Times Book Review
“A nuanced portrait of a musician deeply engaged in the complexities of her art …intelligent and affecting…Hoffman writes about music and musicianship with poetry and precision, wit and melancholy.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Haunting… Hoffman captures beautifully the juxtaposition of art's transcendent beauty with the profound political uneasiness of our times.”

Greg Sandow, ArtsJornal
“It seemed at first like a quiet novel, but lovely and honest... And the honesty is both emotional and musical. This is one of the few novels I’ve read that — in its scenes of concert life, in its account of what the pianist thinks when she’s playing, and in its scenes from the pianis’s long-ago student life — really convey how classical music works. Hoffman...is both observant and wonderfully sensitive.”

Chicago Tribune
“A turbulent tale that grips the reader's attention. Hoffman's musical training, her sensitivity to current events, and her own traumatic life experiences combine to make for a distinctive novel that is fully worthy of our attention.”

The Washington Times
“Appassionata is a serious pleasure, a meditation on character, society, the world and beauty.”

NPR.org
“Appassionata is a sophisticated work...a nuanced look at the role of music in our lives, the creative process and, most inspiringly, the good and ill that follow when all restraints are removed from our day-to-day existence.”

O, The Oprah Magazine
“Adagio, accelerando–words that mark the way music moves through time and, in Eva Hoffman’s acute new novel, Appassionata (Other Press), describe the dynamic of human emotion, the subtle “vocabulary of the soul.” Isabel Merton is a brilliant concert pianist, a medium who transmits the passions of Mozart and Chopin, through her fingertips. Unmoored from her marriage, on tour in Europe, she meets Anzor, a charismatic Chechen exile. Their romance is hardly unexpected, but Hoffman’s eloquent insights into “the intimate history of violence” rings startlingly true.”

The Jewish Chronicle
“Hoffman has produced a compelling account of the life of a concert pianist...in her latest novel, Appassionata.…Hoffman's musical training, her sensitivity to current events, and her own traumatic life experiences combine to make for a distinctive novel that is fully worthy of our attention.”

Times Literary Supplement
“An organic portrait of a thinking, feeling artist coming to terms with her world.”

Chicago Jewish Star
“An ambitious, complex work that demands a reader’s attention as it explores issues of art and politics, purpose and meaning, nationalism and internationalism guided to eventual resolution by the romantic lyricism of Chopin and Schumann.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Hoffman’ s prose is reliably gorgeous…what’s memorable is the way Hoffman maps the intersection of art, history and man's striving for meaning.”

Booklist (starred review)
“An exquisite and disquieting story of love, terror, and loss, with geopolitical resonance and a profound moral calculus.”

Kirkus Reviews
“Ambitious and elegantly written.”

The Urban Coaster 
“It’s always been deemed a great challenge to capture the power and immediacy of music in writing, but in her second novel Appassionata (Other Press, 2009) award-winning author Eva Hoffman bravely takes up that gauntlet while also wading into the murky waters of world politics.

From the Publisher