Book: The Pianist

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The Pianist
Władysław Szpilman
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Named one of the Best Books of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times, The Pianist is now a major motion picture directed by Roman Polanski and starring Adrien Brody (Son of Sam). The Pianist won the Cannes Film Festival’s most prestigious prize—the Palme d’Or.

On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside—so loudly that he couldn’t hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air.

Though he lost his entire family, Szpilman survived in hiding. In the end, his life was saved by a German officer who heard him play the same Chopin Nocturne on a piano found among the rubble. Written immediately after the war and suppressed for decades, The Pianist is a stunning testament to human endurance and the redemptive power of fellow feeling.


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** spoiler alert ** Like many of the previous reviews, I found it rather astonishing that the book was written in a very cool, indifferent tone. It was almost like reading a story with the writing in a first person perspective and with the emotion in a third person perspective.

In the movie, we never know who the kind German Officer was, in the book, we find out. It is also, at the same time, a depressing and an uplifting one: depressing that the German Officer who had shown mercy did not get said mercy himself; uplifting because in all the terror, the brutal merciless perpetrators, we find a kind-hearted person among them.

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It was an amazing movie.

It was an even better book. Pardon the colloquial-ness, but OMG this was an amazing read.