Hammerklavier (Theatre books)

By Yasmina Reza

Book Overview

Yasmina Reza is best known as the author of the immensely successful Tony award-winning play Art. Her latest work, Hammerklavier, is a bittersweet collection of autobiographical sketches that have love, loss, and the relentless passage of time as their themes. Convinced that one's deepest thoughts can be said simply, Reza does so with unequaled humor and perceptiveness. She contemplates evanescence and death in her young daughter's toothless smile, secretly mourning that it will inevitably change. In the title story, the sometimes adversarial but very loving relationship Reza shared with her father is examined in terms of their love of music.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807614513
• ISBN13: 9780807614518
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: George Braziller
• Length: 126 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Simplicity concealing profundity

I'm only familiar with the French original, so I cannot comment on how, or indeed whether, the translation has caught Reza's tone. The original is stunningly spare and simple in its prose, like Beckett or Pinter but without even their levels of affectation. Yet each sentence glistens. Passing moments, events, sounds, emotions are caught with precision and soul. The microtomed slices of life thus presented accumulate somehow into a profound, deeply moving, yet unsentimental esthetic whole. With this work, Reza reveals yet another dimension to her very considerable Art.