Self-Portrait with Russian Piano: A Novel

About this book

A legendary literary figure who initiated a one-man Beat Generation in his native Germany Wolf Wondratschek is eccentric monomaniacal romantichis texts are imbued with a wonderful reckless nonchalance. Now he tells a story of a man looking back on his life in an honest Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man. Vienna is an uncanny magical and sometimes brutally alienating city. The past lives on in the cafes where lost souls come to kill time and hash over the bygone glories of the twentieth centuryor maybe just a recent love affair. Here in one of these cafes an anonymous narrator meets a strange character like someone out of a novel: a decrepit old Russian named Suvorin. A Soviet pianist of international renown Suvorin committed career suicide when he developed a violent distaste for the sound of applause. This eccentric gentlemansometimes charming sometimes sulky sometimes disconcertingly frankknows the end of his life is approaching and allows himself to be convinced to tell his life story. Over a series of coffee dates punctuated by confessions anecdotes and ragesand by the narrators schemes to keep his quarry talkinga strained friendship develops between the two men and it soon becomes difficult to tell who is more dependent on whom. Rhapsodic and melancholic with shades of Vladimir Nabokov W. G. Sebald Hans Keilson and Thomas Bernhard Wolf Wondratscheks Self-Portrait with Russian Piano is a literary sonata circling the eternal question of whether beauty music and passion are worth the sacrifices some people are compelled to make for them. A romantic in a madhouse. To let Wondratscheks voice be drowned in the babble of todays literature would be a colossal mistake. Patrick Sskind international bestselling author of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer