{"product_id":"selfportrait-with-russian-piano-a-novel-9780374260491","title":"Self-Portrait with Russian Piano: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003eA 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\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45953160904757,"sku":"ByrdShop_0374260494","price":44.42,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780374260491.jpg?v=1788180243","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/selfportrait-with-russian-piano-a-novel-9780374260491","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}