The music of the day

The ebb and flow of time becomes the main focus in this memorable collection of stories.

- BY TIM UPPERTON

Time is a difficult subject to represent in fiction, though this hasn't prevented writers from attempting it. In their singular ways, Proust, Joyce and Woolf demonstrate in their novels that how we experience time is different from the ticking of a clock, and that a moment may loom larger in our memory than the decades either side. Short stories, being short, usually focus on a significant incident - there's no room for before and after.

Ben Shattuck's stories in The History of Sound sometimes do this, and sometimes span many years - and from one story to another they leap centuries, and back again. Time is less like an arrow arcing into the future and more like a yo-yo, or perhaps a winding continuum, where the past - a grafted fruit tree, the wax cylinder recordings of turn-of-the-century American folk music, a crosscut saw stuck in a tree trunk at an abandoned logging camp - is just around a bend in the river, unseen yet there, as the present is here.