夕霧の庭

The Garden of Evening Mists.

An ambitious novelist do not just write but write after doing the foot work. Getting the facts and the research for details will take half the time of writing.
Mediocre writers are happy with line like "He sat down and bang on the piano for the rest of the night."
Into further research would an ambitious novelist go like getting the brand for the piano, how the piano came into the pianist life, etc.
Reading The Garden of Evening Mists (when translated into Japanese 夕霧の庭　or Yuugiri no Niwa) by the Booker Prize winner Tan Twan Eng, I am not surprised at all for his winning this prize.

I picked from this book, "She listens to it every night, before she sleeps. Built up an extensive record collection of the same piece of music too, with different pianists-Gulda, Argerich, Zimerman, Ashkenazy, Pollini. The music drifts through the house, a whisper from an older time. The piano is accompanied only by the quartet and the music has the bleak purity of a set of stones lying on the bed of a stream, a stream that dried up a long time ago."

The writer's style when he listed all the different pianists, make readers more knowledgeable and this becomes an added-value to reading a novel.

Knowledge is an improvement on one's life. Reading a book of knowledge goes so far even long after the book is closed.

*****