Finished reading on: December 24, 2008
The Pianist
Title of the original version reviewed: «Il pianista»
AI Translation Notice: This review was translated from the original Italian using artificial intelligence. Book quotes and excerpts are translated interpretations and will not match the author's original English phrasing or official published translations.
The book belongs to a period prior to the "detective-style" novels and deals with the years immediately following Franco’s death, marked by the initial disillusionment with the democratic system and the left’s inability to bring about genuine change.
It is a tedious novel in both content and style, far removed from the detective fiction of the subsequent period, even in its setting and depiction of life in Barcelona.
Dialogue predominates, often repetitive and sluggish, in which the protagonists seem to fulfill preordained roles as bearers of broad thematic meanings (by now bound to distant debates and events) rather than expressing personal stories.