Piano

Max Delmarc is a fifty-year-old concert pianist whose stage fright is so crippling that he drinks to get through performances. Jean Echenoz, the French novelist who won the Prix Goncourt, follows Max through his ordinary struggles, then through his sudden death and into the afterlife.

Max first lands in purgatory, which is part luxury hotel and part minimum-security prison, watched over by famous people who have already died. He is then sent to the urban zone, a hellish district that resembles Paris on its most miserable day, all gloom and cloud.

Without his piano or the drink he has depended on, Max clumsily tries to reassemble his old life while looking, without success, for the woman he once loved. The book, a bestseller with 50,000 copies sold in France, is a witty, mocking take on Dante and Sartre written for today, and it shows an author at the height of his powers.