It has been two years since I last purchased a book without knowing anything about it. The last time I did this was with a collection of science fiction short stories, and while I got an excellent rant out of it (no longer online), I didn’t get much enjoyment. I had considered the possibility of doing this again—gambling gift cards on books I’ve never heard of, so I don’t feel bad spending my own money when they turn out bad—but I wasn’t specifically intending to when I came upon this book.

“I’ve been very lucky in the book department, lately.”

I have to say: I’ve been very lucky in the book department, lately. I can turn reviews of even mediocre material into fun-to-read screeds. I fully realize these are more interesting than blatant swooning which, if nothing else, makes me look like some sort of viral marketing agent. But also, I make an effort to speak my mind as honestly as possible. If the book doesn’t suck, I’m not going to go around highlighting the bad parts because it makes for a schadenfreudistic blog entry.

That being said, I am actively on the look-out for more bad books I can make fun of. I can’t guarantee I’ll read the entire thing, but I’ll definitely write about it. In the past, people have told me that my vitriolic book reviews are something I should do more often. So here’s an open request to all my readers: if you’ve read an especially bad book that you think I’d enjoy hating, by all means bring it to my attention. If anything, it’ll help balance out all these good reviews I have coming up.

Back to the book at hand. I was browsing the music section of the local B&N looking for an entirely different book, when I found The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart. They didn’t have what I was looking for, but for some reason, this unassuming title gave me pause. I flipped it open and read the first paragraph. Then I finished the page. Then the next. And suddenly I was at the end of the second chapter.

The book would be described as a memoir, I think—which is curious to me because I never would have considered myself the memoir-reading type. It’s a tale of pianos and the author’s rediscovering the instrument via a small Parisian piano shop. I have had a fascination with pianos recently and the book fed right into that, but otherwise it is surprising to me that I should find this book so fascinating. And yet, there I was sitting on a footstool in the bookstore, yearning to begin chapter three despite having many more things in mind that I needed to get done that day. So I took it home.

Carhart’s prose is beautiful. It gives the story an air of magical delight, as if there was something otherworldly about this (presumably) real locale. Of course, just the notion of “piano shop in Paris” by itself is almost unbearably charming. You’ve got Paris. Anything in Paris is romantic. And you’ve got a shop—or perhaps more appropriately, a shoppe—which bespeaks quaint, undiscovered wisdom. And then you’ve got pianos, which are sophisticated and elegant and inspiring, and all those other breathless adjectives that make people want to write about them. This is a recipe for overwrought sentimentality.

But I didn’t feel it was that way at all. Carhart is honest without being simplistic. He’s excited without being trite. And the tale is emotional without being kitsch. Just reading the description on the back made me wonder, how much can someone write about pianos, anyway? Although the book is basically just a series of slice-of-life vignettes which happen to have pianos in them, they tie together, for the most part, into a more satisfying whole.

I do have two, rather specific, complaints about the book. First, it being in France, the characters speak French. I do not speak French. Carhart seems to be straddling a line between wanting to tell it like happened (in French), but not wanting to commit the Hollywood character cliché where the foreign national speaks English with a foreign accent, except for the most basic words, like Oui, which are in the native tongue. I’m sure Carhart, as everyone else, knows that the only French words someone like me is likely to understand is Oui and Non and the odd phrase like Omlette de Fromage, yet about once per chapter he puts in an entire line of dialogue in French—and doesn’t foot note it.

I really have no problem at all with French being in the book. Actually, I think this is great. But a lack of translation—even a lack of glossary in the back—makes it seem like Carhart is defining himself into an intellectual elite—which is no doubt very inspiring to other French speakers, but condescending otherwise, considering the book was published for an English speaking audience. (There were explanations about half the time, but you had to use contextual clues to figure out what had been said.) Alright, I see what you did there. I’m a dumb ol’ American who’s uncultured and rude. Sure, I could have looked up these phrases on the Babelfish translator, but that was upstairs on the internet while I was down in my living room reading, and I didn’t want to interrupt the Parisian piano shoppe adventure to figure out what ruelles means. I’m not complaining about the French being in the book, but rather that the tone its unexplained presence conveyed—intentional or not—was a bit insulting.

Secondly, there was one chapter that seemed slightly out of place from the rest of the book, and I’m rather ambivalent about it. Carhart devotes a chapter to the Fazioli company, the makers of the best, if not most expensive, pianos on the market. It’s an interesting side-trip he takes, but little comes of it (it’s near the end of the book, anyway), and it’s doesn’t seem to matter in the larger context the way the other stories do. In other words, it feels like an advertisement. It’s not that the chapter is boring. Maybe it started to tend towards that overwrought sentimentality I was wary of at the beginning; Carhart is positively swooning his way through this chapter, and it feels artificial. So Fazioli is the Ferrari of pianos, I get it. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that the book would have been a bit more focused and solid without this.

All in all, though, I found it to be a wonderful read. I’m not sure who I would recommend this to, however, simply because it’s not the sort of book I thought I would ever read, much less enjoy. Maybe it was just a breath of fresh air in the midst of all the serious philosophical type stuff I’ve been doing. Not that this book is devoid of existentialism—we are still in France, of course. But it was handled well, and approached from a different angle, and perhaps, also, I was just in the right frame of mind.

-Ted