After I saw the video "The Piano" I wanted read the book. I was very fascinated by the story about Ada's life, or rather her way she started her new life. And the whole life without a word. In the video the features of the people are very important and I wondered how it would be in the book. The language is very poetic! The description of the characters and the surrounding is very exact. You think you can feel her feelings and see what she sees.

The piano is such a beautiful, artistic story of the woman whose will is so strong. Love is warm and kind, but at the same time, it is so destructive. Love is like the ocean that we draw from and jump into. This is a perfect novel for women who know the warmth of love; its hope, its faith, and how cruel it can be. I strongly recommed it!

The Film and Novel are both very good. For those people who loved and lost someone, this story will most definitely be experienced as powerful and very emotional. The story of a bittered woman who has more or less given up on life. In time she finds a new meaning to her life. Finally letting go of the past, temp faith and start a new future. This is definitely one of the best stories I have read and seen !

This book is really quite dreadful in that it's quite confusing, seems to have little plot. It reads like the person who wrote it was a little off in the head, more like reading broken personal thoughts than a cohesive novel. Dissapointing because it seems like much could have been done with it if it didn't just seem to lose contact with reality.

I was first appealed by this book because I'm really a fan of Kate Winslet and I've read all the books that relate to the movies she did (thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure", Esther Freud's "Hideous Kinky" etc...).I also have seen most of Jane Campion's movies so I really wanted to know what the story was all about before confronting the movie (Holy SMOKE is said to open fall 1999) I think that the themes of "Holy Smoke" themselves are thrilling: a prohibited love relationship mingled with the search of spirirituality, all of this set in Australia. This is how the story goes: Ruth, an Australian young woman who fell under the spell of a guru and his cult in India is brought back in her country by her family in hope of deprogramming her. This family, which by the way is more wacko then Ruth , hires PJ Waters (a professional in deprogramming) from New York. All along the book Ruth and PJ develop a strong sexual attirance between each other which ends in a delirious erotic relationship. From this moment we know that this relationship cannot lead to something serious or even to love. I think that that's where this story looses its charm. I know that Anna campion wrote the best part of the book(especially the erotic passages) so it seems to me that we learn more about her than about Ruth and PJ.Moreover it seems that the story's only purpose is to show that PJ and Ruth become slaves of their perversities. However, this book was made as a support, a form of screenplay of the movie, so let's say that the movie will be better than the book (hopefully).

I actually read the book before I saw the film. I love this story.What I love most is that P.J. and Ruth really did fall in love under some very strange ,unusual,one in a million circumstances.Its not the marriage kind of love but love none the less.