Sonata in the key of `P'

Pianos are the forgotten instruments of the 21st century. Too big to fit into the average two-bedroomed townhouse, too noisy to practise in the intimate sound-world of a semi-d, the once-ubiquitous piano has been overtaken in recent decades by the electronic gadgetry of an impatient era. Children who would once have laboured over Czerny studies now spend their evenings channel-hopping via remote control; fingers which would once have ached from arpeggios now double-click to beat the band as they surf the Net with effortless ease. Maybe this is progress - many reluctant piano students would certainly say so - but if you're a lapsed pianist who occasionally, secretly, hankers after the good old days when a generous proportion of your leisure time was devoted to Beethoven bagatelles and Brahms waltzes, this elegant little book will bring you right back there before you can say "An American in Paris".

Ah, yes; an American in Paris. That's T. E Carhart for you, and The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is the sort of book which could only happen when those two particular cultures collide, new world show-and-tell inquisitiveness meeting old world reserve and snobbishness to produce as bubbly and invigorating a concoction as Gershwin ever whipped up at the keyboard.

It began almost by accident. While walking his children to and from kindergarten along the quiet streets of his quartier, Carhart became fascinated by what appeared to be - but surely couldn't be? - a piano repair shop.

"Something seemed out of place about this specialty store . . . far from the conservatories or concert halls and their related music stores that sprinkle a few select neighbourhoods. Was it possible that an entire business was maintained selling piano parts and repair tools? Often a small truck was pulled up at the curb with pianos being loaded or unloaded and trundled into the shop on a handcart. Did pianos need to be brought to the shop to be repaired? Elsewhere I had always known repairs to be done on site . . . "

Forget it, he told himself; having no piano, he could hardly come up with a plausible reason for going into a piano repair shop. Then inspiration struck. He would go in and ask if they knew where he could buy a good second-hand instrument. He did: they didn't. The brush-off was thoroughly polite, typically Parisian - in his place, most people would have slunk away, head tucked under arm in embarrassment. But the American in Carhart persisted, returning to the shop time after time with the same inquiry. Eventually it was intimated to him that in order to become a customer at Desforges Pianos, he would have to be recommended by someone in the quartier who was already a customer - a delightfully arcane hurdle which, after weeks of fruitless inquiry, he finally stumbled over, gaining entry into what proved to be no dusty atelier but a piano lover's paradise, an Aladdin's cave of instruments assembled from all sorts of odd musical corners of the world.

Luckily for us, Carhart is a writer of sufficient skill and patience to bring us right in there with him. We don't just get to see these glorious instruments; we get to hear their various voices, smell the exotic woods from which their cases are made - lemonwood, rosewood, mahogany - caress their gleaming keyboards. Carhart understands piano passion and communicates it well. He knows that for a piano-fancier, the urge to lift a demurely closed fall board - the long, curved piece of wood that protects a piano's keys - is almost irresistible. And what he doesn't know, he isn't afraid to ask his new-found friend Luc the piano man, so that as the book progresses, we learn the personal histories of all sorts and conditions of pianos. Steinway concert grands, an instrument which might or might not have belonged to Beethoven, a Chinese number in brassy black lacquer - and a stripey chrome-and-wood job with Cyrillic lettering.

"Russian?" I asked doubtfully. "Worse: Ukrainian." Luc's tone was doleful. "Let's just say that they learned half the craft from the Germans and for the rest" - he trilled on an imaginary keyboard - "they improvised."

If you're wondering whether the subject of pianos is sturdy enough to sustain a book of some 200 pages, don't. Carhart ranges over a wide variety of topics, from his own unhappy experiences as a student to his delight in rediscovering the piano as an adult, from the relative merits of an Erard and a Pleyel - Chopin preferred Pleyels - to what, exactly, happens when you depress a piano key; from the development of the modern concert grand to the science of strings. He quotes Oscar Wilde and Rosalyn Tureck, he goes to master classes (as an observer, not a participant) and he has memorable encounters with a range of musical characters, including an alcoholic piano tuner and a professional accompanist whose playing he overhears through an open window.

And he does, indeed, buy that second-hand piano - a Stingl baby grand, to be precise. One can only wonder how many readers of this immensely rewarding book will be tempted to follow his example.

Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist