The ten stories in Violin Lessons are intensely imagined, autobiographical non-fiction. Each story stands alone, but recurring themes – music, exile, memory, mass murder, and survival – emerge and play out across the collection.

Memory is not a plodding, linear recounting of the past for Zable. A good example is the story ‘Violin Lessons’, which begins with Zable recalling his childhood violin teacher, the aloof and authoritarian Mr Offman. A jump cut takes us to a story-within-a-story where an old man named Naji Cohen tells Zable of his first violin lessons in 1940s Baghdad and of his eventual escape from persecution to Melbourne.

Cohen’s tale kindles a desire in Zable to find out more about Offman, who has been dead for years. Random details of Offman’s life accumulate, including the extermination of his family in Auschwitz and his flight to the Middle East. Then, as if by accident, Zable discovers that Offman performed in Baghdad around the time Cohen was still living in the city, falling in love with the violin and starting lessons:

This last shard of information arrests me. I have found the point the storyteller yearns for, the moment a tale yields its symmetry and attains an unexpected harmony … Perhaps all stories if pursued will eventually yield their symmetries, their unexpected meanings. Then again, perhaps this is the storyteller’s illusion, an innate longing to make sense of life’s fragility and chaos, to contrive order out of what is in reality a play of chance. Does it matter? Perhaps it is enough to tell the story.

Zable’s slide into this meta-narrative register is a characteristic move in many of these stories – it’s a revelation, drawing us into the inner workings of Zable’s writing method. It is also a decoy. In ‘Violin Lessons’, this meta-narrative shift seems to tie the story up neatly, but the piece continues with a beautiful coda that gives the narrative one last unexpected turn. It would spoil things to divulge further details, but Zable’s intertwining of Offman’s and Naji’s stories with his own, and his meta-narrative feint before delivering the final emotional punch, are both sure signs of a master storyteller at work.

At the beginning of another story, ‘The Dust of Life’, Zable is in Phnom Penh in 1970, remembering Saigon. He recalls riding motorcycles through the city with an Australian photojournalist, talking to stoned American ‘grunts’, and hanging out with a fifteen-year-old street boy who tells Zable about witnessing his village being bombed. The narrative immediately switches to suburban Melbourne and his mother’s recurring nightmares in which she remembered her village in Poland being destroyed during World War II. Zable again shifts into meta-narrative mode at this point, contemplating the contradictions of being a witness to history – the feelings of guilt tangled up with the imperative to tell one’s story.

This is the pattern of Violin Lessons: Zable travels, hearing stories of genocide and survival, of guilt-laden memory, of exile and of music. Each place he describes – Melbourne, Switzerland, Ithaka, Venice, Berlin, Poland – and all the stories he gathers there become ‘memory books’. One character comments, ‘All writers are thieves and scavengers.’

The first nine stories of Violin Lessons lead up to the longest and last, ‘The Ancient Mariner’, which tells the story of Amal, one of the forty-five survivors from the asylum-seeker boat SIEV-X that sank in October 2001 (more than 350 people drowned). Zable’s piece fulfils his promise to Amal, as she lay dying of cancer, that he would tell of the horrors she witnessed.

In incantatory language that combines the logic of dreams and the intense emotion of the legendary Egyptian singer Umm Khultum, Zable gives Amal a voice to express the otherwise unutterable:

And I see the children … the children look fresh. They look like angels. They look like birds, like they are going to fly on the water. One girl, she is eleven years old, and she is lying on the ocean, and her eyes talk to me. They are saying, ‘What crime have I done?’ And I say, ‘Oh poor, beautiful girl,’ and I see her falling asleep on the ocean.

In another meta-narrative epiphany, Zable compares Amal to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner – both condemned forever to tell their stories to all who would listen. For both, storytelling allows the expiation of survivor guilt and gives their lives new purpose.

At its best, Zable’s writing reminds me of W.G. Sebald’s – enigmatic, self-aware, exploratory. In his hands, storytelling paradoxically becomes a salve for the unhealable wounds it describes, memory brings home the shock of loss – but is also the only way of reaching the dead – and music is a trace that both recalls exile and undoes it.