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Published May 2009
272 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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.
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"Adagio, accelerando – words that mark the way music moves through time and, in Eva Hoffman’s acute new novel, Appassionata, 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." - O, The Oprah Magazine
"Starred Review. An exquisite and disquieting story of love, terror, and loss, with geopolitical resonance and a profound moral calculus." - Booklist
"Ambitious and elegantly written, but seriously overdetermined." - Kirkus Reviews
"Literate readers with a taste for the international will especially enjoy this highly intelligent work." - Library Journal
This information about Appassionata was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
Interesting Link: Eva Hoffman writing about her life and music in The Guardian.
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