Appassionata (Hoffman)

Appassionata
Eva Hoffman, 2009
Other Press
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590513194


Summary
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 destructive-ness, or the richest art. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 1, 1945
• Where—Krakow, Poland
• Education—B.A., Rice University (Texas); Yale School of
   Music; Ph.D, Harvard University
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Award, American
   Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters Award
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK


Eva Hoffman is a writer and academic, born as Ewa Wydra in Poland after her Jewish parents survived the Holocaust by hiding in Ukraine. When she was an adolescent, her family immigrated to Canada in 1959 and her name changed to Eva, and upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship and studied at Rice University, Texas (English literature), the Yale School of Music, and Harvard University, where she received a Ph.D. in literature.

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.

Eva leads a seminar in memoir once every two years as a part of CUNY Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. She lives in London. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia.)

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

Discussion Questions 
1. Does Isabel feel her life of "bourgeois heroism" (Page 5) and global travel to be somehow lacking? What do you think her malaise is about?

2. Ernest Wolfe is from an old world while Jane is from a new one. How do they contrast? How does music bridge their very different views of life? (Pages 103, 108, 150)

3. Compare Isabel and her husband Peter. How does Isabel think of him? Why does she leave him?

4. Anzor’s rage at the unjust treatment of the people of Chechnya has no bounds. How doe he manifest his rage? Do his feelings and some of his observations seem justified? At times Isabel agrees with him but she later begins to lose respect for him. Is Isabel naïve? Is Anzor?

5. The bombing, what Isabel calls "anti-music" (Page 298) throws her into a sea of doubts about art and meaning. How is she able to reawaken from this state of despair?

6. Ernest Wolfe says in his memoir, "I have also studied death. I come after….I was the child who ate death for breakfast. Only that ground is true, all the rest is ornament. Whatever sounds of pity and praise I find must rise up, however improbably, out of that." (Pages 87-88) Compare this with Anzor’s reaction to injustice and death.

7. In an interview Isabel is asked if it is arrogant to believe that European classical music expresses timeless and universal values. Isabel responds that it must not be since people all over the world want to listen to it. How does Appassionata illuminate the universality of music?

8. What does Anzor’s story about his father’s killing of his dog say about his conflicts between hate and love? What does it say about forgiveness?

9. Anzor shows a tremendous sensitivity about honor and respect and equates his rage with self-respect. Does his portrayal help you understand how this could turn into extreme violence? Can you imagine different ways to react to the indignities that he feels his people have suffered?

10. When Anzor says he loved his dog Isabel realizes she has never heard him use the word love except for his country. He had emphasized his feelings for his country over any individuals, including his family and friends. How does his nationalism affect his capacity for love?

11. When Isabel reflects on her relationship with Anzor, she realizes that “part of her has been poured into him, and part of him is now within her” (Page 183). How do parts of Azor show themselves in Isabel after the bombing?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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