This experimental mosaic novel by a Serbian author - who is often compared to such luminaries as Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges - consists of seven wispily-connected stories about unexpected encounters with music. A teacher of autistic students, a librarian, the purchaser of a music box, an elderly woman at a train station, a scientist-turned-painter, a dying professor, and a violin-maker's apprentice seem deceptively ordinary until sudden shifts in time or place thrust them into a realm where all the conventional ways of appreciating music seem not to apply.

This experimental mosaic novel by a Serbian author - who is often compared to such luminaries as Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges - consists of seven wispily-connected stories about unexpected encounters with music. A teacher of autistic students, a librarian, the purchaser of a music box, an elderly woman at a train station, a scientist-turned-painter, a dying professor, and a violin-maker's apprentice seem deceptively ordinary until sudden shifts in time or place thrust them into a realm where all the conventional ways of appreciating music seem not to apply.

2008-03-18 'Without music, life would be an error.' - Nietzsche

Nietzsche once claimed `Without music, life would be an error'. The nihilistic Romanian thinker Emil Cioran, heavily influenced by Nietzsche, said on God, `without Bach, God would be a complete second rate figure'. I cannot think of anything better than these two aphorisms to convey the impression the Serbian writer Zoran Zivkovic's `Seven Touches of Music' made on me. Each narrative compliments the others forming a beautiful mosaic novel fittingly contained in an exquisite black cover. `Seven Touches of Music' is reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft's short story `The Music of Erich Zann', which possesses a similar inexplicable pull.