Self-Portrait With Russian Piano, by Wolf Wondratschek

In Self-Portrait With Russian Piano the visible conceals the invisible.

Who’s talking? That’s a big mystery in Self-Portrait With Russian Piano, although the novel isn’t a mystery. Only the narrator is mysterious, because it is difficult to determine when he is narrating or when his protagonist, Suvorin, is reminiscing about his career as a pianist. The narrator presents himself as an ancillary character in the story. It’s a disguise, and with careful observation you will see that, on account of the empathy in his sly commentary, the narrator is a second protagonist who has most likely also suffered from old age and loss. Suvorin’s life is not so much quoted by the narrator as it is lamented.

A reader of this novel must be patient with the prose and work to disregard all the conventional reading techniques normally used to follow a story. One cannot be lazy. There is not the usual punctuation, and no quotation marks, to let one know who is talking or who is observing. And pronouns do not help. It is context only that tells you who the “I” and the “he” are, and then it is easy to lose track. A setting can with the turn of the page soar away like a helium balloon, the string to which you had not a firm grasp. And the narrator sometimes photobombs.

To some extent, reading this novel is similar to learning a new language. It is helpful to read and reread the first chapter to figure out the cadence. Halfway through the first paragraph a sentence starts with an “I.” On account of the sentences before it, you may think it is the narrator continuing his opening scene. It isn’t. The “I” is Suvorin. And then, only two pages later, the narrator leaps into the narrative with his own “I,” saying, “I hear a man talking.” Only two paragraphs later Suvorin’s “I” returns: “I look forward to it.” This complexity exists on almost every page of the novel, and you must train your ear to hear it.

Generally, when you come across a third person pronoun, the “I” that follows it will be Suvorin. But not always. This is the author’s genius at work, for his use of first and third person pronouns allows him to create multiple dimensions in the relationship between the protagonist and the narrator. Here is an example: “He looked past my head at something on the wall. The blessing of a long life? I don’t know. Just more unfulfillable dreams.” Who is the “I” in this passage? One must think about colors without shapes. And then, just when you think you have it, Suvorin talks about friends from his past, first Zagursky, and later Schiff. Before you know it, Suvorin becomes a narrator himself, and then another dimension is added to the story when our original narrator speaks from Schiff’s point of view.

In Chapter V the reader gets a clear view of the narrator’s subtle digressions. He reports observations about Suvorin by a waiter, who tells that Suvorin was once captivated by the eyes of the waiter’s wife. The narrator comments later that he doesn’t think that the waiter understood “that the old gentleman, as he called him, had fallen outside of time. Nowadays people like him only exist in novels. They’re a sorry lot.” And then, before you can say, “Schubert,” Suvorin is speaking again, this time about his distaste of applause. Chapter IX is aptly titled, “Who Knows Who It Is You’re Talking To?” The chapter is the novel’s allegro. The answers Suvorin gives make the narrator furious. Suvorin, he says, “plays with his answers like children play with putty.”

Is it worth it? To exercise careful observance on every page turn? Hell, yes! The beauty one experiences from reading this novel is priceless. Think about sitting on a bench at the Metropolitan Museum. In front of you is a Van Gogh. Do you just give it a glance or do you work at looking at its complexity? Think about a Schumann symphony. Do you fast forward between movements? Now, if you were expecting a Lee Child novel, you may be in the wrong place.

The novel’s settings include Vienna and Russia. The narrator’s interviews take place in Vienna, a city Wondratschek uses to illustrate Suvorin’s struggles with aging. Suvorin “was making his way through a maze, that of his apartment, that of the city, that of his wandering course through a life that would have driven so many others to surrender, if not to suicide.” He goes to cafes, often to La Gondola with the narrator, to graveyards, to secondhand bookshops, and to a Russian Orthodox Church where he encounters a priest coming down an aisle with a toolbox, to whom he says, “Here I am, a little man in need of help.” As a child in Russia, Suvorin’s relatives brought him postcards. They are lost when his grandmother dies. His life in Russia appears when he slips “into a gap in memory, no shoes, no dream.” Wondratschek’s imagery is beautiful in these Russian passages, even if distressing. Chickens bleed to death in Suvorin’s hands. The Germans take their soap and matches. “People who went to bed didn’t get up again.” And then came the Stalin men, the ones who wanted to rid Suvorin of his “political errors.” They took his piano, and then, worse, he became a state-sponsored pianist, always with one foot in a labor camp.

When the reading of Self-Portrait With Russian Piano is finished, the reader must stand back and ingest the music that has been played. It’s sometimes hard to find a tune amongst the novels absurd dimensions. When your mind wants to assign a rigid meaning to the passages in Wondratschek’s brilliantly layered narrative, do not let it do so. Some passages change from refrain to interlude, depending on how your read them. In Suvorin’s words, “Music isn’t a room you repaint.” And, finally, the novel’s characters may not be who they appear to be. In fact, Suvorin may be a ghost, a figment of the narrator’s imagination. One of them observes at one point that “(t)he visible conceals the invisible.” Instead of feeling lost, read a paragraph twice and let yourself be surprised!

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