yong : book 5/25 : The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

I am an arrogant reader. Many times as I read, I find myself questioning an author's skill, his motives, his truth. Times when the words seem not to be the voice of authority, the voice of god, the voice of truth, but the voice of a human being, fallible and untrustworthy. Times when the art is so transparent that it shows, becomes artifice. Less often now do I allow the piper to completely entrance me, follow without question, believe, trust. Simply accept. Daniel Mason's The Piano Tuner, bought for a buck at a Katrina-relief garage sale, swept me away to Burma, with an assured magic that never had me looking for the trick behind the cheap illusion, the little man behind the green curtain. His skill at improvising words and sentence structure to create the feel of a dream, or of a long night spent drifting back and forth between sleep and consciousness, flat out impressed me. What's most remarkable is that the guy who wrote this book was only 26 at the time, that this was his first novel, that he was just a kid about to enter UCSF med school.

I haven't seen much of the world. I've crisscrossed the United States and Canada and been to Korea, but no countries beyond those three. This book took me to Burma in the same wonderful, wonder-filled, tourist's-eye-view way that Sophia Coppola's Lost In Translation took me to Japan. It made real the exotic names of Rangoon and Mandalay--without making them any less exotic. It took me there by way of an 1880s steamer, in the shoes of an awkward piano tuner named Edgar Drake, under the flag of the arrogance and excesses of British imperialism. Daniel Mason took me on a journey; I thoroughly enjoyed the trip.