SILENCE

A traveler’s guide to noise and silence.

Black, white, and gray images depict the world around us. A silhouette of a person with a cowlick holds a finger up to their lips, telling readers, “I’m looking for silence. It must be lurking around here somewhere.” We follow the seeker as they embark on a hunt. It’s impossible to find silence in a daytime city, of course, but the woods are also full of noises, as is the night. Poetic lines like “They say silence holds many secrets for those who want to hear them” crash somewhat discordantly with more straightforward explanations like “Space is a kind of vacuum. A vacuum is a place without air where sound does not travel. That’s why we can’t hear a thing.” In the search for silence, we learn that we cannot even find it within our own bodies and are told, somewhat confusingly, that “its secrets are the hidden sounds we found along the way.” There’s a lot going on in this book tonally, and the loose structure makes it feel more like a meandering conversation than a story, though with a striking visual component. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A strange lesson about finding what you’re not looking for.