There's nothing like a book about music to remind the reader of the silence. Nothing else insists so emphatically on what we are usually happy to forget: that, during the hours we read, our lives have gone quite still, and we are taking a stranger's word for the world. A landscape, a face, a building, a painting, even a taste, an odour, an emotion: we will readily accept words for these, because we feel able to usher words into the space we've cleared for them. We are not resistant to descriptions of sound, from traffic to birds to sea-surf to tones of voice: we have rough ideas of all these things, and will gladly let a talented stranger mould them in the service of a story. We don't even have a problem with being told that a stream of pop music or jazz or classical fills the background: we have our own playlist on hand to individuate such moments; the deep quiet recedes.

LRB 9 April 2009 | PDF Download