Like Parsifal, Ishmael and many others, Knize learns that the quest is the thing. From her home in the mountains of Montana to the canyons of Manhattan to the forests of Bavaria, her pursuit of the ideal piano and the ideal sound is relentless, an at times quixotic adventure filled with unlikely twists and unexpected rewards.

Grand Obsession is actually four books in one, or four stories in one book:

1. Perri Knize's mid-life struggle to learn to play the piano.
2. Her search for the perfect piano for herself within her means.
3. With such a piano at last in her house, her pursuit of people who will make her piano sound the way she wants it to.
4. Her odyssey into the arcane world of piano builders, trying to understand how such a complex and in some ways clumsy instrument can speak to herself and so many others so soothingly and seductively.

An obsession? Surely.

Grand? That too. Knize’s musical heart’s desire turns out to be a grand piano from a lesser-known German manufacturer, Grotrian-Steinweg. Grand also in the way the instrument takes over her heart and her life. (At first meeting, the piano even gets a name—Marlene.)

It’s the medieval knight and the grail, the wild American sailor and the whale all over again.

Such great and worthy quests are not without their moments of comedy, or maybe tragicomedy. Knize, a well-known environmental reporter, is sufficiently self-aware (and self-confident) to let us share offbeat moments, when, for example, one of her would-be guides tries to lead her into the briarpatch of anthroposophy (anyone for Rudolf Steiner?), or when her search for the FOREST from which the tree came from which her piano was made(!) leads her into the Bavarian Alps and a wee village so picturesque that she herself admits it is somewhere beyond mere kitsch.

For a music-lover and especially for a piano-lover, reading Knize’s gripping confessional tell-all is like a pubescent Boy Scout discovering Henry Miller. Musically, she really does tell all, or as much as it is possible to tell about such a non-verbal, evanescent art as what happens when you play Chopin at the right time on the right piano.

Thrilling and heart-stopping, her account gives one serious pause in this digital age when all is bits and bytes. In a sense, Grand Obsession is a mystery story, not so much a who-dun-it as a how-does-it. How is it possible for six or eight thousand pieces of wood, metal, and felt to come together in a way that touches us like few other experiences?

Perri Knize doesn’t find the answer, but she uncovers lots of provocative, stimulating questions along the way as she explores the arcane niche-world of piano sellers, tuners, voicers, and manufacturers. Her reportorial skills are astonishing—how can she collect the volume of fascinating piano trivia that she does while at the same time keeping us apprised of the weird and wonderful people she’s dealing with, not to mention the constantly waxing and waning musical hopes within herself?

It spoils nothing to say that the story has a happy ending. Of sorts. She gets the piano she wants, sounding the way she wants. Sort of. Mostly. Sufficiently. But then, that’s life, isn’t it? At some point she learns that her quest is for perfection and then must learn the hardest lesson of all, that perfection is always just out of our grasp.