Connected through music and literature: The Weight of a Piano & A Bookshop in Algiers

If you’re reading through the lockdown, or listening to more music, you might be interested in these two books featuring dual narratives connected via an “instrument” of the arts. The second is a translated novella set in and around a real-life bookshop and publishing house; the first is about heartbreak compounded by the fear of letting go from a publisher who mostly does translations.

The Weight of a Piano by Chris Cander

Katya is eight when a neighbour in the Soviet tower block, having recognised her love of music, bequeaths her a piano. She trains as a musician, becomes a teacher but, when she moves with her husband and baby to California, the piano is left behind. The marriage already soured, she misses her parents and her music, although she dotes on her son.
 
Clara is eleven when her father brings home an early birthday present; of course, she thanks him, but she’s never asked for a piano, or a musical instrument of any kind. The next day it’s disappeared, and the day after she’s orphaned: when her parents die in a house fire as she staying at a friend’s, the piano is all she has left of her former life. It accompanies her through various flat moves and doomed relationships, although her hands are better suited to her work as a car mechanic than caressing the keyboard.
 
These two strands gradually come together in an unusual road trip through Death Valley with a taciturn photographer. It’s a beautiful story about obsession, fear of intimacy and the distorting pain of childhood loss. I don’t give more detail for fear of spoiling the reading journey, but I’d heartily recommend it as a lockdown read. Thanks to Europa editions for my review copy.

A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi translated by Chris Andrews

Two young men and a city bookshop, eighty years apart. Edmond Charlot is building it from nothing; Ryad is on a bogus internship to assist in its demise. A tiny space, once the mouthpiece of Algerian radicals and the heart of a shoestring publisher, by 2017 it hasn’t sold a book for decades; even as a government lending library it’s struggled to dispense its books. Nevertheless, as Ryad discovers when he comes to do a clear out, it’s cherished in the neighbourhood, perhaps more as a symbol of the country’s struggle for independence from France.
 
Those politics make Charlot’s strand the most alluring, and his character more upbeat. But the miserable book-fearing Ryad furnished for me the novel’s only laugh (and that a cynical one regarding the bureaucracy required to donate much-needed books to a local school). Unfortunately, the historical strand unfolds mostly through Charlot’s condensed diary entries. These, despite references to famous authors – a few I’ve read, like Camus, Lorca, and Henri Bosco, along with many I’ve never heard of – were a world away from Samuel Pepys.
 
Charlot’s trials would earn a nod of recognition from any small publisher or bookseller trying to keep their heads above water in our own troubled times. Serpent’s Tail, who provided my proof copy back when the coronavirus was just a Chinese thing, is one of several small publishers in need of our support. (You can find more at A Life in Books.) My favourite title from them is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler and, if you haven’t read it, get hold of a copy now! (Or hang on for my next post with a review of Rabbits for Food: a more recently published novel from Serpent’s Tail I did enjoy.)
 
My fellow IQ author, Clare Stevens, has put together a wonderful post on how Inspired Quill, stranded in Spain, is keeping going through the lockdown. Supporting them has just got a whole lot easier with four short story collections – including mine – discounted when purchased in e-book format directly from the publisher.