"Self-Portrait with Russian Piano" by Wolf Wondratschek; translated by Marshall Yarbrough (FSG)

 

ISBN: 978-0-374-26049-1

 

"Self-Portrait with Russian Piano" is an interesting title to this dream-like narrative of an unknown narrator having a series of cafe meetings with a Russian pianist named Suvorin.  The novel goes from first-person to third and beyond, as we get a series of stories about a great musician's life. Does the title hint that the Suvorin is giving the story about his life, or is it more of an imagined or made-up landscape by our mysterious narrator? 

I never heard of Wolf Wondratschek, whose name sounds like a James Bond villain, but that is probably because I'm a Californian fellow with love for the exotic - real or not real.  The location is set in Vienna and a series of cafes or an Italian restaurant.  Suvorin mostly orders water and is keen to talk about his life to this stranger.  He is old, a widow, and it seems that he may have met a new and one presumes a young lover.  We are never sure what is fact or fiction, but we do get the full personality of Suvorin, in that reminds one of an eccentric Glenn Gould.  Like that pianist, Suvorin grew to dislike the sound of applause from a live audience.  He prefers silence or a meditative series of moments after performing a piece. 

The duality is that it is a book about music and the dream-like encounters one has in life, and perhaps a bit of a self-conversation among the pros and cons of culture in a city like Vienna.  Wonratschek is an amazing writer, and this tightly told work in short chapters, which reads like a short story to me at times, is quite remarkable.