Appassionata (Hoffman)

Book 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...? 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 important counterpoint in this intelligent and affecting novel...is the lovely line tracing isbel's realation to her playing.
Sylvia Brownrigg - New York Times Book Review


As a child, Hoffman studied piano and dreamed of performing professionally until she redirected her ambition toward writing; here she wields her expertise in both with dazzling success. Acclaimed American pianist Isabel Merton, on tour in Europe, becomes romantically entangled with Anzor Islikhanov, a semiofficial representative of Chechnya who follows her around Europe. They are both enthralled to personal passions—hers for music, his for his ravaged country—and their relationship intensifies with thrilling inevitability as a Chechen radical leader (with whom Anzor is not-so-secretly sympathetic) manipulates Anzor's allegiance to his homeland and drives a wedge between him and Isabel. Hoffman's prose is reliably gorgeous, and while the narrative lends itself nicely to sharp commentary and observations on politics, power and the role of the United States in a changing world, what's memorable is the way Hoffman maps the intersection of art, history and man's striving for meaning.
Publishers Weekly


The award-winning Hoffman, former senior editor at the New York Times and the author of several highly regarded works of nonfiction (e.g., Exit into History), has now written a compelling novel that charts the inner life of her heroine, Isabel Merton. Isabel is an accomplished pianist, and on one of her many tours abroad, she encounters the mysterious Chechen rebel Anzor. At first, she is drawn to him and feels sympathy for his cause, and soon enough she enters into an affair with him. They meet clandestinely in various European cities, but as she comes to learn more about his mysterious undertakings and witnesses at close range the havoc they can create, she comes to question her own values and her fragmented, unsettled way of life. Interspersed throughout the narrative are flashbacks to Isabel's earlier life, which appear in a journal she is reading, kept by her former music teacher in Berlin. Hoffman reveals here an impressive command both of classical music and of world affairs. Literate readers with a taste for the international will especially enjoy this highly intelligent work.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Hoffman asks what defines humankind, bloodshed or art? Her answer? Suffice it to say that when disciplined and devoted pianist Isabel compares her hands to Anzor’s, she realizes that hers are stronger. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


A concert pianist falls for a Chechen nationalist, with disastrous consequences. Hoffman displays the same weakness that slightly marred her first novel (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: She can'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