The Piano Tuner

The best book I have read this year.

Read this years ago now but it's still high up on my long-term favorites list. Rarely have I been more thoroughly transported into a culture so alien, yet rendered with such exquisite richness of sensory detail as to immerse me in a magical sense of its immediate presence. Like the main character - a sort of innocent (even an archetypal Fool) engaged in the bizarre (but believable for Britain's Empire days) task of transporting a piano hundreds of miles through progressively impossible 19th century Burmese terrain to bolster a strategic military connection - I slipped almost unawares into an increasingly addictive surreal, lovely and treacherous world, filled with golden temples and narrow, greenery swathed, near-vertical footpaths shrouded in mist, from which I soon could not imagine turning back. (Hmm; some comparison could perhaps be made to the deep in-country journey at the heart of "Apocalypse Now," with the increasingly surreal flavor of the landscape and culture, and the fateful, suspenseful sense of leaving all familiar parameters behind and heading toward some existential and possibly transfiguring/annihilating destiny). There's also a love story, and a rich Burmese historic-fiction plot (tribal tensions, coup, catastrophe), of which I can't recall the details so many years hence, but for me these elements were all contributory ingredients in the book's principal magic of completely transporting me to a place I'd barely known existed: an immensely satisfying experience of exotic armchair time-travel. It could be thought a challenging read by some in its sense of strange displacement (I'm scared to recommend it to my book club!), but I *loved* it. It's even on my "read again" list, and that's a very limited roster. If you are fascinated by remote Eastern cultures, exotic foreign landscape, and unusual metaphorical/metaphysical journeys, please read this book.

I think it's better.