Seven Touches of Music

Zoran Zivkovic
Aio Publishing Company (2006)
ISBN 1933083042
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (9/06)

I am certain everybody has heard the old adage “Do not judge the book by its cover...” many times. Well, in the case of Zoran Zivkovic’s “Seven Touches of Music” you would not be wrong if you would do just that.

Aptly subtitled a mosaic novel, this book very much resembles its cover. The cover is black, the overall design unusual and quite beautiful. This darkness is pierced with just a touch of glimmer – the metallic green letters of the title. Even the edges of the book are black. 

All seven of the stories in this novel are black as well – very dark, very powerful and very beautiful at times. They all talk about more or less ordinary people – a teacher, a library employee, a widower, an old lady traveling to see her sister, a pensioner, a professor and an apprentice to a violin maker. The stories are short and vivid, connected by music as a magical and sometimes slightly super-natural phenomenon. The language, which is quite terse at moments, flows beautifully. They all seem to share something flimsy and vaguely tangible. It might be the solitude that seems to be a common denominator for all of the protagonists, or maybe the fleeting moment of strange enlightenment they all seemed to have at some point in time. Each of the stories left me just slightly puzzled and feeling vaguely blue. Maybe I should have listened to music while reading them…

My favorite of the seven is “The Cat,” a story of a widower who starts to visit second-hand shops after his wife’s death. On one of his visits he discovers an old music box. He does not really like it, but he feels compelled to buy it since he tripped over it. He takes it home and … Strange things began to happen and for a fleeting moment he sees an alternative to his past life. It is definitely a haunting image…

“Seven Touches of Music” is a beautifully written book that I’d highly recommend to lovers of good fiction and anybody who does not mind thinking a bit while reading a book.

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