Two sisters. One loves quiet, needing a silent, invisible place to study her numbers and read her novels. The other loves to play the violin and sing and hum and deliberately press the keys of a piano with a well curved hand.
That's the conflict that starts this series of impressionist images that form into the silence: the fishing story. Written by America Hart, this novel is 150 pages of prose poem with a surprising use of punctuation and nary a capital letter.
Its rendered repetition is mesmerizing; America can link phrases using the otherwise bland conjunction of and with a haphazard skill reminiscent of Hemingway. Other images recur like the soft pounding of a drum: a walking stick, lichen over stones, a meadow at night, long flowing hair, waders and creel, picking flowers for a vase, a moon envisioned, the cleaning of a fish. And always, the silence. Each trope is revisited again and again, like rhythmic footsteps on a well-worn path.
One can almost hear the tinkling piano of Satie's Gymnopédies, a composition the author references in this musical construction of syncopated words. The song of distant, talking voices, the sawing of a bow over taught strings of dinner conversation. Hart's novel spans four generations of Natalia's family, an ancestry of women in dresses and boots, playing music while gripping a fishing pole:
standing on the bank of a river, natalia stands alone. casting his line into the water, natalia's father stands on the river bank beyond her, at some place obscured from her view so that she cannot see his face, his green waders; cannot envision him nor imagine what he is thinking or feeling as he walks along the river bank, beyond her somewhere. I cannot be pulled by the strength of these forces, she thinks, cannot lose myself to the tug of the current, the fight of the stream.
The story of this family is always ended, marked by diary and tombstone, and yet always taking place at once, the time of each life overlaid. The clock and its moon stand still for these women, their fathers and their evenings and their lovers and their aprons, though the river moves, always moves in ripples downstream like a played arpeggio between its banks.