The History of Sound: Stories
“This is a book to linger over, for the thoughts in it and for the words and the ways the author uses them.”
Ben Shattuck has written 12 paired stories rooted in New England landscapes and culture, echoing a song form popular in the 18th century. The second story in each pair is intended to amplify, explain, or provide a twist to the first. (Note: The first story is paired with the last, not the second.) The author mostly succeeds in his story pairing.
The title story is a reminiscence of first love set in Maine in the summer of 1919 when two gifted musicians, Lionel and David, travel the state to record folk songs on wax cylinders. The author describes Lionel as having aural synesthesia: “a perfect C and I tasted sugary cherries.” And “a wobbly circle, blackberry purple, for D.” This is characteristic of the wonderful language the author uses throughout to evoke sensation for the reader.
The story opens in 1984 when an older Lionel receives a box containing those cylinders (lost he’d thought) at his home in Cambridge. The recovery brings back memories of the love affair with David, who died later in the summer of ’19. Lionel remembers “I didn’t experience the guilt that some men in my time would have. I just loved David. . . .” The chained story “Origin Stories,” talks of Annie who finds the cylinders and her growing disaffection for her husband. It includes a thoughtful discussion with David’s wife of a year about first loves, quoting Shakespeare, “End first love while in bloom, before it dies petal by petal.”
Ben Shattuck is a gifted writer and the way he uses the paired stories in this collection is innovative. The pairing is not the same in each instance. The fault in some of the pairings, as in this one, is the lack of tension in the tales. Annie goes back home with no resolution about her marriage. There seems to be little at stake for the characters, well drawn though they are. Yes, Lionel is shaken when he hears David on the first cylinder he plays, though he had thought little of him in the intervening years, “I tasted salt and tobacco, saw the round shape of the color indigo thein into a rod of deep orange, then flash into a point of black that filled my mouth with the taste of stone.” Sensual language, characteristic of that the author uses throughout.
There are harsh tales in this collection: “The Children of New Eden” and “Introduction to The Dietzens: Searching for Eternity in the North American Wilderness.” “Children” is the story of a religious cult set out to settle land in western Massachusetts in 1696. Too predictably as a plot line, the leader Karl Dietzen is strict and arbitrary and has taken for his companion a pretty young girl whom he keeps to himself.
Among Dietzen’s followers are Emma’s sister and husband Philip who observe Emma’s pallor and thinness. Emma’s attempt at refuge with them is thwarted by Philip. “And so, Philip knows that he will, after his prayer and with as much certainty and duty as he just placed his hands upon Karl’s . . . he will carry Emma out if needed, all the way back up the hill. Even the thorn of this decision that has now pricked his conscience, this droplet of blood . . .” The quote is extended to give the reader an idea of the 17th century style the author uses in this story. One of the distinguishing features of this collection is Shattuck’s way of matching his writing style and voice to the period in which the story takes place. It makes the reading and the coupling more realistic.
The second part of the Dietzen tale is more grim. The settlement is massacred by French soldiers and trappers on the orders of a French commander, thinking it was an English outpost attempting to gain a foothold in that part of the New World. The author of “Introduction to . . .” explains how he first encountered Dietzen’s bible as a child, and now as a professor, rediscovered it and talks in very scholarly fashion about the other sources he used to write the book.
Particularly recommended is the coupling of “Radiolab: ‘Singularities’” and “The Auk.” The first story is written as a radio call-in show back-and-forth about the discovery of a photo of an auk dated 1991 when the last known appearance of the bird was in 1844 off Iceland.
“ANNA: But you think it was real?
NATALIE: Not a question whether it’s real or not, is it? You saw the photograph that Will took?”
In the “The Auk” we learn how it was a husband’s gift to his wife that created the photo.
This book is not a page turner. There are stories, yes, but not those with traditional arcs and plots, or tension and suspense. This is a book to linger over, for the thoughts in it and for the words and the ways the author uses them.