SELF-PORTRAIT WITH RUSSIAN PIANO

Pensive, philosophically charged novel of old age and loss.

Two principal characters occupy the pages of prolific German novelist Wondratschek’s book. The first is a writer who fades into the background to privilege the second, his subject, a Russian pianist named Suvorin living in exile in Austria. “Vienna is full of Russians,” Wondratschek writes, “young and old, living and dead, poor and rich. Seems like every time the phone rings there’s another one, man or woman, arriving or leaving for good.” Suvorin was famed in his youth for his playing, but now he is “a forgotten celebrity” who nurses memories of the horrors of World War II (“Death came, and there was no one left to explain it”) and has to take “a little family” of pills every day. The only piano he now possesses, writes Wondratschek in a subtle turn, is in his mind—and even then, only as “a place to put photos.” (Naturally, Glenn Gould comes under discussion as having been “right to quit early.”) That mind is capacious, though, and inclined to seek meaning for all the things he has seen, heard, and experienced: the meaning of a mysterious cat that sheltered the headstone of a pianist whose gravesite he traveled to Paris to visit, of courage in the face of oppression (“Just think of young Brodsky, who on top of that was a Jew!”), and, memorably, of the idea of perfection, something known to a skilled carpenter, a soccer player, a mathematician, but elusive to the demanding Suvorin. Wondratschek’s layered narrative reflects on language, art, politics, and history, and though nothing much happens in it, there is plenty to think about. Wondratschek even sneaks in a few jokes through his two interlocutors, as when Suvorin writes to a daughter: “If it can be avoided, [the postcard] says, don’t marry an American.”

Readers with a bent for Thomas Mann and Elias Canetti will find this book a pleasure, if a somber one.