- guardian.co.uk, Friday September 22 2000 11.55 BST
Thad Carhart, an American in Paris, walks every morning past a piano shop in his quartier. One day he decides to pop in: and so begins the story of his friendship with the shop's owner, Luc Desforges, and his own rediscovery of the pleasures of the piano.
In these days of warts-and-all memoirs, where each new celebrity attempts to trump his or her predecessors with ever more lurid tribulations of drugs and abuse, Carhart's exquisitely laid-back, Francophile meandering came as a breath of fresh air: "charming", "rich with evocation", "unashamedly poetic", said the reviewers. John Carey in the Sunday Times was captivated: "as desultory as an evening stroll, yet full of knowledge . . . when you close it you feel you have been on holiday," he purred.
For Carhart does not only tell the story of his new friendships and struggles with Chopin; he also sketches the workings and the history of the piano, as Luc talks him through the disassembled skeletons awaiting his attention in the sunlit, dusty Parisian atelier. From the trail of broken-backed pianos left by the tempestuous touring Beethoven, to the golden hand-made age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the modern giants: Steinway, Bösendorfer, and Fazioli.
Yet Carhart's way of dropping such nuggets into the gently wandering stream of his recollection left some critics dissatisfied. Stephanie Merritt in the Observer wrote that "at times Carhart's effort to stuff these miscellaneous elements into a narrative feels a little strained". In these pages, Steven Poole pointed out that the technical passages lack original musical argument, concluding that it was "an amateur's work, both in that it is written out of love, and in that it is content to stroke the lacquered surface of its subject without delving too deeply into it".
Michael White in the Telegraph complained that Carhart fails to explain "how a piece of wood and metal makes the graduation from machinery to art". "He just doesn't have the words," White grumbled. Odd, then, that John Carey thought quite the opposite: "Remarkably, he can choose words that make us feel and hear the instruments he plays." Perhaps it is with such evocative, painterly books as it is with music: we each hear something different.
