Appassionata Paperback - 2011

His eyes become remote again, his mouth set. He turns away from her, and picks up a jagged stone and throws it, with surprising force, down into the small ravine. A faint sound reaches them, mixed with the unvarying, gurgling water. She follows the movement of his torso as he turns effortlessly with the extension of the throwing arm. Line of beauty, she thinks, line of grace. . . . The casual arc of the throwing arm seems to slow into a timelessness; and suddenly, as if in concert with the elongated curve, she feels a surge of longing so sudden and powerful that she’s afraid she’ll fall from it, that her chest will cave
in as from a blow.

Anzor’s eyes return to her, still occluded, still looking into another distance; then they gather toward a more focused light. His face is for a moment fully unmasked, and he directs at her a stare that takes her in with a kind of encompassing ferocity. She stares back. He is very near and at a great distance. She knows nothing about this man, except the sudden power of his presence. A line of attraction and danger seems to vibrate between them in a tense ostinato. She feels she could travel a long way along that line, beyond the dark glow of his gaze, and into whatever lies within. For a moment, their eyes lock.

Then the moment is over, and they start walking back to the car. On the way down the winding road, they talk politely, as people who are getting acquainted talk.

The New York Times Book Review
“A nuanced portrait of a musician deeply engaged in the complexities of her art …intelligent and affecting…Hoffman writes about music and musicianship with poetry and precision, wit and melancholy.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Haunting… Hoffman captures beautifully the juxtaposition of art's transcendent beauty with the profound political uneasiness of our times.”

Greg Sandow, ArtsJornal
“It seemed at first like a quiet novel, but lovely and honest... And the honesty is both emotional and musical. This is one of the few novels I’ve read that -- in its scenes of concert life, in its account of what the pianist thinks when she’s playing, and in its scenes from the pianis’s long-ago student life -- really convey how classical music works. Hoffman...is both observant and wonderfully sensitive.”

Chicago Tribune
“A turbulent tale that grips the reader's attention. Hoffman's musical training, her sensitivity to current events, and her own traumatic life experiences combine to make for a distinctive novel that is fully worthy of our attention.”

The Washington Times
“Appassionata is a serious pleasure, a meditation on character, society, the world and beauty.”

NPR.org
“Appassionata is a sophisticated work...a nuanced look at the role of music in our lives, the creative process and, most inspiringly, the good and ill that follow when all restraints are removed from our day-to-day existence.”

O, The Oprah Magazine
“Adagio, accelerando–words that mark the way music moves through time and, in Eva Hoffman’s acute new novel, Appassionata (Other Press), describe the dynamic of human emotion, the subtle “vocabulary of the soul.” Isabel Merton is a brilliant concert pianist, a medium who transmits the passions of Mozart and Chopin, through her fingertips. Unmoored from her marriage, on tour in Europe, she meets Anzor, a charismatic Chechen exile. Their romance is hardly unexpected, but Hoffman’s eloquent insights into “the intimate history of violence” rings startlingly true.”

The Jewish Chronicle
“Hoffman has produced a compelling account of the life of a concert pianist...in her latest novel, Appassionata.…Hoffman's musical training, her sensitivity to current events, and her own traumatic life experiences combine to make for a distinctive novel that is fully worthy of our attention.”

Times Literary Supplement
“An organic portrait of a thinking, feeling artist coming to terms with her world.”

Chicago Jewish Star
“An ambitious, complex work that demands a reader’s attention as it explores issues of art and politics, purpose and meaning, nationalism and internationalism guided to eventual resolution by the romantic lyricism of Chopin and Schumann.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Hoffman’ s prose is reliably gorgeous…what’s memorable is the way Hoffman maps the intersection of art, history and man's striving for meaning.”

Booklist (starred review)
“An exquisite and disquieting story of love, terror, and loss, with geopolitical resonance and a profound moral calculus.”

Kirkus Reviews
“Ambitious and elegantly written.”

The Urban Coaster 
“It’s always been deemed a great challenge to capture the power and immediacy of music in writing, but in her second novel Appassionata (Other Press, 2009) award-winning author Eva Hoffman bravely takes up that gauntlet while also wading into the murky waters of world politics.”

Eva Hoffman was born in Krakow, Poland, and emigrated to America in her teens. She is the author of Lost in Translation, Exit Into History, Shtetl, The Secret, and After Such Knowledge, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award, and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in London.