The Weight of a Piano

The Weight of a Piano is a novel by the American writer Chris Cander. Built around a Blüthner piano, it uses a dual narrative to trace the intertwined fates of two women linked by a single instrument. One strand begins in the Soviet Union of the 1960s: Katya, a girl who encounters the piano early in life, when it is almost the only tenderness and light in her dire circumstances. She once seemed destined to become a concert pianist, but marriage and the upheavals of the era uproot her as she emigrates to America with her husband, and her life is rewritten entirely. Most painfully, the piano too is sold in the turmoil, separating her from it forever. The other strand unfolds in a small California town in 2012, where Klara, a young piano technician who knows nothing about music, keeps the only thing her parents left behind after their accidental deaths: this old piano. Lonely and stubborn, she feels the instrument as both a crushing burden and an attachment she cannot renounce. The arrival of a photographer unexpectedly uncovers secrets about her family and origins hidden behind the old piano, and brings the two lives, spanning fifty years, into final convergence. Taking the piano as its thread, the novel weaves in works by Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Schumann and others, layering the weight of music onto the weight of life: an object can bear witness to a whole life, and through keeping faith with it and parting from it, a person gradually comes to know herself. The Chinese edition is translated by Yuan Tian and published by Motie · Dayu Reading.