If you are not in the habit of reading short fiction, Ben Shattuck’s extraordinary “The History of Sound” might make you a convert.
Rooted in New England landscapes and culture, the collection of six paired stories is structured along the lines of a “hook-and-chain” song format popular in 18th century New England. As with the two lines of a musical couplet, the second story in each set either amplifies or provides a twist to the storyline of the first.
The story opens in 1984 when a much older Lionel, now a renowned music scholar, receives a box containing those cylinders at his home in Cambridge. The wife of a Bowdoin College professor had found them in the house they had recently bought and had tracked down his address. Stories in this collection often turn on a chance discovery, shifting a narrative in unexpected ways.
Set in the present-day, “August in the Forest” is a wry, bruising character study of an insecure writer in search of creative inspiration. In a New Hampshire museum, he comes across an old newspaper article that highlights an unsolved mystery from the early 20th century: an entire camp of loggers found dead, lying in the snow outside their cabin.It is not until the companion tale, “The Journal of Thomas Thurber,” set in 1907, that we learn what led to the loggers’ demise.
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