The Oldest Sound

If you decide to read Dimitri Anastasopoulos’s second novel (and I think you should), Farm for Mutes, then resist the urge to first read the jacket copy. Instead, dive straight into its remarkable, tone setting description of the hagfish. There, you find a voice that is as knowledgeable about arcane facts as it is of recent literary stylists who marvel readers as much with the power of language, as they do with the material world that language represents—whether awe-striking or ordinary in its particularities. Farm for Mutes is chiefly concerned with sound, yet its tone ironically invites visual descriptions delivered in a deadpan tone that (nonetheless) voices inscrutable curiosity. Said otherwise: while the narrator clearly displays an interest in his subjects, what motivates his questions and how, or even if, he judges the information he gleans, is carefully designed to remain tantalizingly out of reach. Indeed, Anastasopoulos requires that we explore the seam that both binds and severs the visual and the aural—a fascination that makes this book’s themes as provocative to mull over as his prose is to read.

The hagfish “entry” is the first in a series of descriptions that read like an encyclopedia assembled by modern poets. Punctuating the novel at regular intervals, they offer an idea of order that defies sequence, but which, nevertheless, makes sense. This first entry anticipates the narrative proper’s gutsy opening, “A screaming came across the sky.” This gesture, playfully invoking Pynchon’s famous first sentence from Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) not only pays respect to the American master’s encyclopedic interests, but also sets us hurtling into a Pynchonesque world. Farm for Mutes similarly features fascinating historical facts that upset the semblance of what we think we “know”—for instance, that Thomas Edison invented the world’s first sound capturing device, the phonograph—while also estranging us from our most familiar experiences. Indeed, a good portion of the novel’s plot arises from an inquiry into the real first sound capturing device—the phonautograph—invented twenty years before Edison’s machine by the now forgotten Édouard Léon Scott de Martinville.

The narrator toys with realism in large stretches of the novel, though its first section opens with an unsettlingly inexplicable mystery. Mary Pinker may have been abducted. Yet it really seems she has disappeared into her own scream, a creepy and compelling reading experience that defines Anastasopoulos’s cosmological realism. The plot then features two families with a sordid, intertwined pasts and focuses primarily on the withering home life of its most prominent character, Luther, and his diseased wife, Sibyl. Owing to circumstances neither fully understands, Sibyl succumbs to a quasi-Victorian infection paranoia that keeps her increasingly bed-bound; on her rare ventures out into the world, she does so garbed in mosquito netting and impermeable plastic fabrics, gloves sealed tight to her makeshift HAZMAT outerwear at the wrist. It’s not clear how much Luther either cares or worries about his wife’s decline. He’s too exhausted by his own lifeless existence to give her suffering much thought.

Though expert at restoring decaying film—a fine irony given his inability to restore his own vitality—Luther’s eccentric employer tasks him with bringing life back to his recently acquired phonautograph. Designed to capture sound in a visual, not aural, form, Édouard Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph scratchings on lamp black offered a visual picture of sound (which interestingly, as a side note, can now be played by twenty-first-century digital imaging). In a sense, Luther is working at recovering the oldest sound in the world, an ambition that could be said to mirror Anastasopoulos’s own.

Though Scott’s recordings were not intended for playback, Luther’s efforts are eventually used to that end. His explorations of the device highlight Anastasopoulos’s mesmerizing prose:

Hard on the outside, soft on the inside: it felt meaty, a roasted pig’s lip. Like a body revealing itself to Luther from the inside out: he discerned light, shadows...