Review: Kurt Palka, The Piano Maker

Running From the Past Doesn’t Make it Disappear…

 Helene Giroux arrives alone in St. Homais on a winter day. She wears good city clothes and drives an elegant car, and everything she owns is in a small trunk in the back seat. In the local church she finds a fine old piano, a Molnar, and she knows just how fine it is, for her family had manufactured these pianos before the Great War. Then her mother’s death and war forces her to abandon her former life. 

The story moves back and forth in time as Helene, settling into a simple life, playing the piano for church choir, recalls the extraordinary events that brought her to this place. They include the early loss of her soldier husband and the reappearance of an old suitor who rescues her and her daughter, when she is most desperate; the journeys that very few women of her time could even imagine, into the forests of Indochina in search of ancient treasures and finally, and fatefully, to the Canadian north. When the town policeman confronts her, past and present suddenly converge and she must face an episode that she had thought had been left behind forever.

My Thoughts

This book immediately grabbed my attention because of the huge influence that music and the first World War would have on the story. I realized halfway through that the story goes a lot deeper than the typical hardships and tragedies of war.

I loved the musical references. It seemed like Palka did a lot of research for this story, and put a lot of effort into making Helene’s job as a piano maker sound authentic. I especially like that the pieces of music he chooses to mention by name are songs written for piano, and not just famous classical and romantic music for other instruments or groups.

I also liked that this book took place during a time period I don’t usually read about. There were heavy references to colonialism all over the world, and it was really cool seeing how Helene and her family business fit into each society. Even after she started traveling the world without the intention of selling pianos, the different places Palka described seemed very foreign to me, just because I wasn’t sure what life was like in the early 1900s anywhere other than in America.

At first, the jumping between the past and present seemed a little awkward, but as soon as I learned why it was necessary, I kept craving more information about what happened to Helene, and what would happen to her. I really like that Palka left out the details readers desired most until the end.

This story took me by surprise, but the most satisfying part was the end. I liked that there were certain characters that stuck by Helene through the whole controversial ideal, and others judged her immediately because of what she was accused of. Nothing seemed sugarcoated, and all of the characters’ opinions and decisions seemed logical to me, according to their personalities.

Should You Read it?

If you’re expecting a book about a war, about music, about romance, about scandal, or about mystery, you won’t find it here. You’ll find all of those things mixed together. Each topic seems to get its own spotlight in this story, so it’s not really a war novel, or a romance novel, or a mystery. It’s a combination of a lot of things, and that would probably make it appealing to a lot of readers.

Cover Photo Source