I like books that show and don't tell. This book is tell tell tell, and then tell some more. It has some beautiful scenes that didn't hit me as hard as I know they would have if there was a little bit more meat to the story than this dry telling of everything.

The deliberate confusing of names is another thing I didn't like. Every character gets a composers name. Like his father Johan Sebastian Bach. Not only was it up to me to remember that this was his dad, he also alternated between only Johan Sebastian or Bach.

At the end I feel I don't know the storyteller at all apart from the fact he whines about death a lot. He claims to nothing almost nothing about his parents, but on the other hand he clearly remembers the name of a shop his father bought a watch when he was around 6, the place where they got a flat-tire around the same age and the names of his parents' friends including their ages.