“She wished that she could read music. She might have hummed the melody, or at least understood why this phrase of music was important or original or innovative enough – or elusive enough, at the risk of being forgotten – to require being written out so urgently. But she couldn’t read music, and so the artifact remained just that: something from a long time ago that she would never really understand.”
I read Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound (Viking 2024) because it was erroneously on a 2025 Booker eligible list I saw. As it was published last summer, it’s not eligible for the prize this year. But what a happy mistake. The History of Sound is a collection of connected stories set in New England and spanning centuries. The writing is beautiful and urgent and cold and wet. You can feel the dampness and chill, and hear the cracking of the wood in the fireplace as these stories, these artifacts of memories, paintings, songs, letters, are how we find glimpses of immortality.
The collection opens with “The History of Sound” – a short-lived first love broken by circumstances and the war. It ends with “Origin Stories” – a dusting off of the “artifacts” of music from the first story and reflection of a modern love story. These two stories are the perfect bookends for the collection, but each story is a part of another and the way the collection is intricately woven is masterful.
As to my favorites of the twelve – it’s hard to pick. I adored “Graft” – about a young woman in the late 1800s whose “husband” had a real family. She left her son with her brother and disappeared. Over a decade later, she sees a boy at a museum that reminds her so much of her former husband, she’s convinced it is her son. “The Auk,” which really needs to be read with its pair, “Radiolab: “Singularities,” is a love story about a man who will do anything for his wife, who has dementia. When he finds a taxidermized auk, a bird long extinct, he takes some pictures to play a joke on his brother. His wife finds them and lights up. And so, the daily rouse of looking for the auk begins, because it brings her joy and reminds him of who she once was.
Each story has a mate, a partner in storytelling. From the mysterious death of a camp of loggers that isn’t so mysterious to the appearance of the auk, to first loves and lost loves and last loves, there’s something so human about this collection.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 