Seven Touches of Music — Zoran Zivkovic

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.