SONATA IN WAX

In Hamlin’s debut novel, a modern music lover attempts to unlock the secrets of a 101-year-old recording.

In 2018 Chicago, classical music producer Ben Weil usually works with live musicians, but he’s just been offered an unusual, posthumous collaboration: to identify and master a long-lost sonata recorded just over a century ago on five wax cylinders and recently uncovered in the storage room of a Maine antique shop. The sonata’s author is unknown, and the pianist is listed only as J Garnier. The work is unlike anything Ben has ever heard: “The music is boundlessly curious, eager to trespass and transgress and build anew. Even today it would be considered avant-garde—how could it possibly be a century old? And the unknown player is a virtuoso by any measure. Every second of the recording beguiles.” Still reeling from the recent end of his marriage, Ben throws himself wholly into the mystery, attempting to decipher the secrets of its music and the identity of its brilliant composer. Ben’s story alternates with another that’s set in Boston in 1915, featuring French-born Elisabeth Garnier, who has training as a social worker but is currently working as a saleswoman for the Bell Company, using her charisma and European sophistication to peddle Imperial Graphophones to the wealthiest households of Boston. Her assignment takes her into the home of the Sanborns, a coffee-industry dynasty with a taste for music—an association that changes her life forever. When Ben accidentally shares the sonata with other influential members of the classical music community, allowing them to imagine that he is the composer, he risks turning a historical mystery into a contemporary scandal.

Over the course of this novel, Hamlin’s rich prose is as deft and precise as the skills of his characters, imbuing the descriptions of music with beauty and drama. For example, when a pianist friend plays the sonata, Ben “wonders what she’s thinking, how her musical mind, with its encyclopedic grasp of the twentieth-century piano repertoire, is analyzing it. But then she moves into the short minor phrase and lands on the first of the suspended chords, her articulation confident, her touch sublime.” There’s a depth of expertise on display in this novel—not only regarding musical theory and history, but also the recording equipment of different eras. Some of the most intriguing passages in the book relate to the wax cylinders, an instance of a fragile technology that contains some of the most impressive analog craftsmanship of the early 20th century. The novel is perhaps 50 pages too long, and the story builds to a conclusion that is perhaps a bit cuter—and certainly more incredible—than it needs to be. Still, by that point, readers will have bought into the tale and be willing to follow it wherever it goes. Classical music fans, in particular, will enjoy this immersive story in which art, technology, and class pressures coalesce to create a timeless work of art.

A deeply realized tale of the power of music and the anonymity of history.