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Life in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the late 1980s is bleak and controlled. The oppressive Communist regime bears down on all aspects of people's lives much like the granite sky overhead. In the crumbling old building that hosts the Sofia Music School for the Gifted, inflexible and unsentimental apparatchiks drill the students like soldiers - as if the music they are teaching did not have the power to set these young souls on fire.
Fifteen-year-old Konstantin is a brash, brilliant pianist of exceptional sensitivity, struggling toward adulthood in a society where honest expression often comes at a terrible cost. Confined to the Music School for most of each day and a good part of the night, Konstantin exults in his small rebellions - smoking, drinking, and mocking Party pomp and cant at every opportunity. Intelligent and arrogant, funny and despairing, compassionate and cruel, he is driven simultaneously by a desire to be the best and an almost irresistible urge to fail. His isolation, buttressed by the grim conventions of a loveless society, prevents him from getting close to the mercurial violin virtuoso Irina, but also from understanding himself.
Through it all, Konstantin plays the piano with inflamed passion: he is transported by unparalleled explorations of Chopin, Debussy, and Bach, even as he is cursed by his teachers’ numbing efforts at mind control. Each challenging piano piece takes on a life of its own, engendering exquisite new revelations. A refuge from a reality Konstantin detests, the piano is also what tethers him to it. Yet if he can only truly master this grandest of instruments - as well as his own self-destructive urges - it might just secure his passage out of this broken country.
Nikolai Grozni - himself a native of Bulgaria and a world-class pianist in his youth - sets this electrifying portrait of adolescent longing and anxiety against a backdrop of tumultuous, historic world events. Hypnotic and headlong, Wunderkind gives us a stunningly urgent, acutely observed, and wonderfully tragicomic glimpse behind the Iron Curtain at the very end of the Cold War, reminding us of the sometimes life-saving grace of great music.
"Not for readers impatient with youth or lyric writing, this passionate novel should be pushed on anyone interested in music, politics, or energized coming-of-age tales." - Library Journal
"Grozni's writing is colorful and strong—his passages describing music and the musical temperament particularly so—but the effect soon becomes one of the same chord being struck over and over..." - Publishers Weekly
"Grozni's writing about music is resonant and nuanced; his writing about life under communism, much less so." - Kirkus
"Wunderkind is a gift for all the senses. Nikolai Grozni’s shimmering, visceral prose unfurls like music, as if a baby grand served as his infernal typewriter." - Patti Smith, bestselling author of Just Kids
"With heartbreaking insight, Wunderkind portrays the searing brutalities of life in Communist Eastern Europe—and the power of music to provide solace and redemption. I found myself astonished, amazed, and moved by this remarkable novel." - Lauren Belfer, bestselling author of City of Light and A Fierce Radiance
“Nikolai Grozni's Wunderkind is an elegant, graceful novel that captures not only the power and beauty of music, but the stifling oppression of life in a totalitarian state. The novel sings and howls, and in its finest moments, takes the reader’s breath away." - Dinaw Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
This information about Wunderkind 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.
Nikolai Grozni began training as a classical pianist at age four, and won his first major award in Salerno, Italy, at the age of ten. Grozni's acclaimed memoir Turtle Feet follows his four years spent as a Buddhist monk studying at the Institute of Tibetan Dialectics in Dharamsala, and later at a monastery in South India. Grozni holds an MFA in creative writing from Brown University. This is his first novel. He lives with his wife and their children in France.
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