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I've been trying to remember the name of this story, or the author, for a couple of days now, and wondered if anyone else knew about it -
It's set in Germany in the 1930s (although I think it was originally written in French) and it's about a sound recordist whose job it is, at the opening of the book, to edit a recording of a speech of Hitler's so that the sense of some of what he says is changed. In order to do this, he has to listen to the speech loads of times, and write down the words to be changed... and in the end he grows to hate the speech, and the Nazi party in general, so much that when he gets Hitler in to re-record the selected words, he makes him say every word, three times, in every grammatical case.
This is just the opening, though, and the main story moves on to being about the fact that he keeps the snippets of tape that just have silence on them, and he pastes them together so that at night, after listening to things all day, he has actual silence which he can listen to, rather than just quietness.
There was also something about his travelling in a Paternoster lift every day, and always wanting to stay on until it started going down again.
The narrative was very fragmented, and I don't remember there being much of a denoument... if anyone has any idea of who wrote this odd little story, or where I could find it, do let me know! |
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