A review by luckypluto
The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

2.0

I did not enjoy this book. I did not like the writing style, nor the unusual grammar and orthography in which the novel is written. It has many moments of rapid dialogue or internal thoughts that are formatted without paragraphs or even periods, making them hard to follow and understand. It has trouble deciding between past and present tense, and feels as though it ought to have been written in the first person. Even the font in which the text is set is difficult to read. The book meanders, like the numerous rivers on which it is set, and for most of its pages seems to be going nowhere. It has echoes of both Heart of Darkness and The Quiet American but resolves into neither. There are a lot of passages about the history of Burma that did not interest me; in fact, they made me groan. I am loathe to use the word “pretentious”, as that word is overused, but I found this book to be pretentious. I feel bad saying this, because the author obviously did a ton of research, and clearly has an affinity for Burma, its history, and its people, but the only reason I bothered to finish this book is because it was selected by my book club.

All that said, the ending is pretty good. The problem is that the story, which for most of the novel is going nowhere in particular, only gets exciting in the last 30 pages or so. The ending is enough to raise my rating from one star to two, but I can't give a better rating to a book that makes its readers slog through 280 pages of the literary equivalent of mud for 30 pages of excitement.