Piano Seeker

After a five-year hiatus, David Wang wrote a special article recommending Kuo-Chung-Sheng's latest novel: "The Lute Seeker" is Kuo-Chung-Sheng's best work.
It is also a rare masterpiece of Taiwanese novels in recent years.

"In the beginning, we were all just spirits, without bodies."
"God uses music to lure the soul into the body, where it loses its freedom."

A piano tuner with extraordinary musical talent, his childhood experiences made him give up his dream of becoming a pianist, and his life became stuck in the passing of time and emotions.
A businessman in his sixties meets a piano tuner because of a piano left behind by his deceased wife. Together they embark on a journey to find the piano...

Everyone is born with a resonance program. "Some seek it in musical instruments, some in songs, and some are even luckier, finding that vibration in this vast world that awakens and resonates with the past, present, and future." Are you also searching for a resonant soul throughout your life?

Following his best-selling and moving prose, Kuo Chiang-sheng, winner of the Golden Tripod Award, the Taiwan Literature Golden Classic Award, and the Open Book Award, returns to fiction with "The Lute Seeker." This is Kuo's first attempt at a musical theme. Each sentence, like a musical note, is precise and elegant, capturing the brutality of love and loneliness, the unrepentant pursuit of soulful resonance. The book is poignant yet restrained, leaving you breathless upon completion. Ma Shifang raves, "This book captures both the darkness of the abyss and the incomparable beauty."

I can't play the piano, yet I chose to write about a tuner lost in despair and longing. It's precisely because of this level of difficulty that fiction writing becomes a never-ending pursuit for me. I finally found a way to gently kiss the wounds left by repression and loneliness. Ultimately, the only thing that can redeem me is this seemingly self-destructive pursuit. ———Guo Qiangsheng

Celebrity recommendations

Pai Hsien-yung (novelist), Gan Yao-ming (novelist), Chu Tien-wen (writer), Ren Ming-hsin (poet), Li Tong-hao (writer), Zhou Fen-ling (writer), Hu Qing-fang (writer), Ma Shi-fang (broadcaster and writer), Ma Yi-hang (writer), Hao Yu-xiang (writer), Zhang Man-juan (writer), Sheng Hao-wei (writer), Chen Jie-an (writer), Chen Bai-qing (writer), Chen Xue (writer), Jiao Yuan-pu (author of "Playing in Black and White" and "Hearing Xiao Bang"), Ye Jia-yi (novelist), Cai Su-fen (novelist), and Tam Kwong-lei (copyright agent)—unanimously recommended (in alphabetical order)

The gentle language of notes, like cat prints, plays out a captivating story, revealing the soulful connection between people, music, and emotions. Only Mr. Guo Qiangsheng's "The Lute Seeker" can capture such a vast snowy landscape and the vicissitudes of life. This is a novel that will linger in your memory. -- Gan Yaoming (novelist)

In "The Piano Seeker," the concept of "love" is a profound and skeptical one, a lifelong theme and variation of Guo Qiang's. The title, starting with "Companionship," addresses the theme: a lonely person trying to keep company with one lonely person after another. This time, I chose to write about a piano tuner, a difficult subject. Through the filtering and sedimentation of time, the poem crystallizes into a restrained love, and an equal measure of loneliness. This culmination of profound experience is refreshing. -- Zhu Tianwen (author)

Wikipedia states that the average piano string has a tension of 68 to 90 kilograms. "The Piano Seeker," from the first word on page one to the last period on page one, tugs at the same tension, each page brimming with tension. This novel, about a tuner and his piano, is poignant yet restrained. Every sentence the novelist writes is precise and elegant, like the right note on the right sheet music, shimmering and glittering. It's like Richter playing Schubert, leaving a moment of tranquility between words, like between notes, a utter lightness and stillness that resonates with the reader, evoking a sigh of relief within. —Li Tonghao (author)

"The Lute Seeker" contains extensive descriptions of music and musical instruments. Having listened to and sung music since childhood, Qiangsheng possesses a keen ear for sound. He has written an aural novel that allows emotions to become purer and more ethereal. This book discusses art, and even more so the narrative art of novel creation. However, love remains the ultimate art in his works, for its imperfections, even its flaws, further illuminate the subtlety and purity of love as art. This is the author's art of solitude and a redemption from sorrow. —Zhou Fenling (author)

The best word in "The Lute Seeker" is "ruined." Extending from the beauty of the music, it reveals a scene of decaying ruins, withered flowers and the five decays of the immortal. This lingering and sorrowful elegy twists and turns to reveal the secrets of the characters in the novel. In those unknown memories of the past, desire and frustration go hand in hand, and ultimately, only silent loneliness remains. --Hao Yuxiang (author)

Reading "The Lute Seeker" is like listening to a swirling piece of music, evoking memories of Meng Ruo's "A Dance of Happiness and Shadows," Kazuo Ishiguro's "Nocturne," Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," Mishima's "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," and even Onda Riku's "The Bee and the Distant Thunder." This novella resonates with nearly every musical novel, with every novel exploring the complexities of human nature and fate, and with every great novel pursuing art and beauty. So inspiring, so rare. -- Sheng Haowei (author)

For centuries, countless masters have hammered away at the black and white keys, passed through billions of ears, and finally crystallized the ultimate beauty of human civilization. To create that ultimate beauty, countless souls have been destroyed, talents wasted, and years wasted. The shore we seek can be the highest peak or the bottomless abyss.
I think this book captures both the darkness of the abyss and the incomparable beauty. —Ma Shifang (broadcaster, writer)

Talking and playing, the qin and emotions. Searching, exploring, questioning. Tuning and mobilizing, technique and memory. Harmony is a lure; no two qin sounds are alike, and no relationship can be replicated or replaced. To discern the mysterious collisions of emotions, to empathize with human loss, Guo Qiangsheng unfolds "The Qin Seeker" for us, constructing the chambers and chords of the heart, the soul and body of love. --Ma Yihang (author)

Those who seek the zither are also searching for people. What they find through their diligent search is the ghost in their lives. The zither symbolizes people, and the music symbolizes emotions. When the zither is used to move people, the music will remain forever, but in people's eyes, only the ghost will remain...
With appropriate musical understanding, the lingering and refined nature of objects, scenes, and emotions is brought out. Each character, for their own reasons, uses the cruelty of memory to restore the purity of sound; the timbre of life sighs endlessly, with no end to recognition. "Disappearance" already exists, sad, realistic, and beautiful. -- Chen Jie'an (author)

If I were a talent show mentor, I would turn my chair around at the beginning of the first chapter of the novel. After "The Piano Seeker", Guo Qiangsheng truly "strengthened the voice" of Taiwanese literary history. When everyone was still using visuals to sketch, Guo Qiangsheng was already proficient in writing sounds. He showed us a beautiful and even more pleasant style - powerful in a certain rhythm, able to be retracted, to advance and retreat, to know when to slow down, to use stories to hook you until your heart is about to jump out of your throat, and how to push it back against the trend along the emotional scale with just a few slow and steady words, and then surge again, as if nothing happened. That is a true master, very transparent, a kind of freedom. You always imagine how slender and beautiful his fingers must be, and how his heart must be full of holes without being touched by his fingers. ——Chen Baiqing (writer)

"Every note is accurate, but the melody is off." Weaving together industry insiders and outside narratives, between accuracy and inaccuracy, "The Qin Seeker" captures the subtle and ambiguous emotional tones, calling on the reader to resonate with the melody and feel the heart's voice. -- Jiao Yuanpu (author of "Playing in Black and White" and "Hearing Xiao Pin")

"The Lute Seeker" is ostensibly about a search for a zither, but in reality, it's about a search for one's body. As a gay man at the end of the last century, his homosexual desires drive him to self-loathing, even to the point of negating his body through the pursuit of artistic "selflessness." Yet, amidst this melancholy, there exists a steadfast pride: I will never give up listening to every detail of pain. After all, that is the only, irreplaceable sound I can produce in this world, using my body as a musical instrument. -- Ye Jiayi (novelist)

Through the union of music and soul, the melodies explore the lingering passions of the soul and the body! A gifted pianist, a piano tuner, becomes obsessed with a childhood love interest. At the end of his search for a piano, a deep inner repression erupts, like the passionate cessation of the piano's sound. The narrative then softens, recounting the artistry and love of Russian piano master Richter as a reflection of his pursuit of soulful love and musical obsession. The book meticulously details the piano music, and the plot follows the rapid and swift rise and fall of a symphonic movement. —Cai Sufen (novelist)

2020-04-01

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