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I'm trying to recall the name of a book I read in the mid-90s. It was probably new at that time. It was a lengthy, literary, philosophical minded fantasy about a faun who spent quite a long stretch of time as an inanimate statue. At the time, it quite challenged my patience and attention span, but I'd like to revisit it.
I thought the name might have been "The Stone Faun" but that title just leads me to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun which definitely is not it.
This could be Hans Bemmann's "The Stone and the Flute" (originally published in German in 1983 but translated in English in 1988).
As I had a similar experience reading it long ago (getting a bit bored and leaving it halfway) I don't remember a lot of details, but I'm sure there was a faun / satyr turned to stone.
Summary from Google Books:
In the country of Fraglund lives a young boy called Listener, a boy destined to inherit a precious stone and a magic flute which will help him to understand life's deepest mysteries. This is his story. As a young man, Listener is blind to the true value of his gifts. Before he can fully appreciate them he must endure many years of adventure and misadventure in his travels beyond Fraglund - with Gisa, evil mistress of Barlebogue castle; as servant to the minstrel Barlo and later as a minstrel himself; with the beautiful and ambitious Narzia, whose magic will commit him to the life of a faun; and with Arnilukka, in whose eyes he finds the colours of his mysterious stone. As he grows older, Listener slowly realizes that his life is caught up in a web of connections far deeper than he had at first presumed.
