Lindsey Drager’s novel The Avian Hourglass is as surreal as it is truly fantastic.
Jesse Ball wrote of the book:
“Drager’s The Avian Hourglass has the mingled timbre of Redonnet & Brautigan: lucid, injured, hope-drunk. It parcels out the world in queries.”
In her own words, here is Lindsey Drager’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Avian Hourglass:
As I was crafting what you will (hopefully) soon hear, a question emerged: isn’t designing a novel a bit like curating a playlist? The parallels between a story collection and a playlist are obvious, but it seems like the playlist as a form has a lot in common with the novel, too. There is a central set of themes or conceptual echoes you’re after, despite trying to create range. You’re going to weave in some subordinate threads to elegantly misdirect and, through misdirection, totally disarm the reader-listener so they reach a state of catharsis that feels both unexpected and preordained. There are going to be echoes or parallel gestures but only sometimes and they’re going to work best when installed obliquely so the reader-listener does some discovering themselves. There are going to be more valleys than peaks—more darkness than stars—in order for the brief moments of illumination (the pinnacles) to feel like a gut-punch. You’re going to have to balance possibility with the simple fact that as the book or playlist progresses, more and more of what could be, what might be, what if? is going to be realized and thus potential will grow increasingly slim. You’re going to have to think about order—about the sequencing of various reveals—to craft a kind of project-wide emotional arc. You’re going to have to reach a point when you let yourself understand that even with all this careful logic and meticulously instituted structure—even despite the illusion of authorial control—the reader-listener is going to be the agent making meaning. You might think you’re giving it life, but the moment it reaches Someone Else is the moment The Novel or Playlist is animated.
The Avian Hourglass is a novel featuring a character caught inside a story she can’t escape. While it’s revealed to the reader she is caught inside that story, the character herself has no idea. When I started this book, I was thinking a lot about what happens to someone when they realize their life doesn’t match the narrative they have written for it. That is how it became a novel about coming to terms with one’s limits, the melancholy of young adulthood, nostalgia and déjà vu. It became a book concerning failure—personal and global—and shifting ideas about home. Because of all of this, it became a novel riddled in video tapes and audio cassettes and terrestrial globes and hourglasses and other archaic, analog technology that is all about recording and measuring and mapping. Maybe these devices don’t record The Past, but they try to record A Past with which one can chose (or chose not) to engage.
This playlist might feel a little gloomy, then. It might feel a bit dated or cliché (nostalgia) and it might include a lot of covers (retellings). But I think it is these flaws that make it the kind of playlist to effectively accompany this book. The playlist has the mouthfeel of the novel. It has the conceptual skeleton, too. In fact, I’m a little nervous that the playlist is likely better than the novel at conveying the ideas and atmosphere I was trying to capture and explore.
Perhaps this means you do not need to read the book at all. You need only listen to what follows.
The Possibilities of Life Beyond Our Own
Sufjan Stevens, “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois”
The opening track on Stevens’s 2005 concept album about the Midwestern state, Come on Hear the Illinoise, “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois” has no discernable time signature as far as I can tell. I used to spend hours trying to figure out the riddle of how time operates here, but I’ve since decided the time signature oscillates constantly, which—to my untrained ear—adds an eerie cadence to a song that is already about a surreal event. That surreal event is also a historical one: around 4 a.m. on the morning of January 5th, 2000, several residents in southern Illinois reported triangle vessels in the sky. I love this song’s tension(s) and the way it balances beauty and discord, something I aimed for in The Avian Hourglass. I also think this song captures some of the discomfort of engaging in a paradigm shift, which those folks who saw the UFO (now UAP) must have felt in the early days of the new millennium. The Avian Hourglass is a little bit meta in that it wants you to remember that the protagonist of the story is being surveilled by us, her readers. We see the protagonist but she doesn’t see us and we gain access to her thoughts but she doesn’t know it. Are we—the readers—the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, hovering above her without her knowledge? If so, at the end of the novel, a case can be made that perhaps she glimpses us.
Living in (and with) Paradox
“Dear someone listening in the shadows / I only talk to you sometimes / and though I ask for help in riddles / it is clearer in my mind, clearer in my mind.” Incandescent in its spareness—we are offered only Spektor’s trilly-gruff voice paired with her piano accompaniment—this song (which might also be a prayer, given the direct address to a spectral “someone”) is a story about a water carrier who fails at her one task. Despite being born in the “month that brings just ice” (January 20–February 18, the Aquarius of the title), and despite this month’s sign corresponding to vessels, the speaker is “not a skillful water carrier,” ultimately relying on her hands rather than a more appropriate vessel to carry her water. It is ambiguous if she fails at water carrying because of external, systemic forces or through her own personal inabilities, but either way, this is a song about living in a paradox. It is a song about callings and what happens when one fails to live up to those callings, even if one thinks they were born to do certain work in the world. This is exactly and precisely the central conflict of the protagonist of The Avian Hourglass.
Unrequited Love
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Maps”
“Maps” is a love song, with the chorus making that clear: “They don’t love you like I love you.” But the intensity of the drums running beneath Karen O.’s nonchalant delivery and the extremely satisfying guitar riff in the middle make for a song that is also, more figuratively, about the frustration that accompanies unrequited love and that strange sense of antagonistic longing and sorrow-rage that characterizes it. This feeling is in part what motivates the protagonist in The Avian Hourglass and when at last she faces The Only Person She’s Ever Loved (the book is delivered in 1st person, so technically the character’s name is “The Only Person I’ve Ever Loved”), I imagine this song is playing in the background of the bus, humming beneath the beat of their contentious discussion.
The Possibilities of Silence
Depeche Mode, “Enjoy the Silence”
There have been many interpretations of the “silence” of this song’s title, from the romantic notion that love needs no words to the idea that the speaker is enforcing this silence on others. However you interpret it, the central notion remains: something uniquely visceral and complicated happens in silence between humans that does not exist in speech. I recall thinking about this song as a kid, in the early 90s when I had a very different relationship to technology. Back then, I was obsessed with the music video, which some have said is inspired by Anton de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. Read intertextually, it’s impossible not to think about the relationship between this song and the journey The Little Prince takes across the universe to gather intel about how best to live his life. How does one—faced with the white noise of the world—learn to value stillness and quiet? Saint-Exupéry’s allegory of traveling through outer space to better understand those who reside on Earth could also be a way of summarizing The Avian Hourglass.
The Inability to Protect People from Themselves
Wolf Parade, “I’ll Believe in Anything”
To me, this phantastic, strangely-spirited song is about wanting to protect someone from the things that hurt them. Spencer Krug’s trembling-yet-assertive voice capitalizes on the irony of the lyrics because of course, anyone—parent or partner, mentor or friend—can never really offer full protection from the world. That is what I see as the center of this song, and why I read the chorus’s delivery as deeply bitter: “I’ll believe in anything if you believe in anything.” That refrain slowly morphs into the song’s climax which a Pitchfork review called “a shopping list of promises of escape and hope”:
And I could take another hit for you
And I could take away your trips from you
And I could take away the salt from your eyes
Take away what’s been assaulting you
It has been said that this song was written in an attempt to relay the “existential horror” that accompanied the death of Spencer Krug’s mother, though I cannot verify that with any direct citation (even after over an hour of research). In any case, if this is even remotely true, that grief impulse may be what drew me to it, as The Avian Hourglass features a protagonist haunted by the death of a parent, as well as a character whose biggest antagonist might be herself. Whatever the song’s true origins, to me the lyrics convey the complexities of trust and faith—in another, in yourself, in something larger than yourself—and in this way, whether Krug intended it or not, the song is unabashedly existential.
Failed Young Adulthood Dreams
Cat Power, “The Greatest”
Chan Marshall’s foggy, crackling voice conveys the hardships of recognizing that the dreams of young adults have a tendency to fall through. There is a yearning behind the strings in this song, and that instrumentation—paired with Marshall’s voice—somehow evokes the sound of a dirge or requiem while the lyrics exhibit a sense of coming to terms. This idea of “want[ing] to be the greatest” and realizing one isn’t—this thriving for status and failing—is part of adulthood but it also might be uniquely reflective of U.S. culture. Perhaps it’s the attention economy or late capitalism or some vestige of the American Dream. Whatever the source, it’s been my experience that the world is not a meritocracy and hard work doesn’t necessarily translate to wish fulfillment. This is something the protagonist of The Avian Hourglass faces in the middle of the book.
The Power of Folktales and Folkloric Narratives
Hozier, “Work Song”
A song that straddles the line between folk ballad and contemporary hymn, “Work Song” has a direct address (a narratee on the other side of the narrator) who seems to be the speaker’s coworkers (“Boys”). This staple element of the oral tradition—telling stories while passing the time during manual labor—is evoked in the structure, but it’s present in the narrative, as well. The story is essentially a tall tale about the woman who saved the speaker and how his love for her is so unwavering, even death will not prove to be an obstacle: “When my time comes around / Lay me gently in the cold, dark earth / No grave can hold my body down / I’ll crawl home to her.” Aside from the folkloric idea of a love so strong it defies death, I’m endeared to the clapping in this song. There is something so evocative in the sound of people using their hands as an instrument in unison, something egalitarian and grass-roots and real, and here I read the claps as both echoing the monotony of routine when doing manual labor while also serving as a way for the speaker’s listeners to co-author and participate in the telling (a staple element of the oral tradition). The Avian Hourglass contains a folktale—the story of “Girl in Glass Vessel”—which proves to play a bigger role later on in the novel than it does on first mention in the opening pages. How big a role this folktale plays is up to the reader to decide.
Physical and Psychological Displacement
Eva Cassidy, “Over the Rainbow”
The Avian Hourglass started as a retelling of Pinocchio. It did not end up that way, but in thinking about some of the themes and concepts that are outlined in this playlist (home, escape, folktales, displacement, adulthood disappointment, the world beyond our own), it strikes me that there are several parallels with another popular narrative: The Wizard of Oz. There is probably no better story about the dream to flee the constructs inside which you have been born to reach a land of your own creation. And if that place of one’s own creation had a destination on a map, it makes sense it would be in the sky. Popularly considered a song about hope and possibility, to me the lyrics convey a yearning sense to escape, and these ideas—about home and its other, belonging and failing to belong—are central to The Avian Hourglass. While there are many covers of this song, which was originally performed and recorded by Judy Garland in 1939, Eva Cassidy—who died at age 33 of melanoma—offers the best I have yet found. Cassidy strips the song down to just her smoky-yet-ephemeral voice and a guitar, but somehow manages a sense of narrative propulsion and yearning (could we call this suspense?) that makes the song even more unearthly.
Finding Hope in Times of Trouble
Jeff Buckley, “Hallelujah”
Written by Leonard Cohen, first released in 1984, and covered by everyone from Rufus Wainwright to k.d. lang, “Hallelujah” is a song that recognizes the transformative nature of hope even in the face of certain disaster and despair. The repetition of the title term is an incantation. It’s a thanks and a plea. It’s been estimated it took Cohen seven years to write the song, which is just one reason it is epic. Another reason is this: “Hallelujah” is a song we all know and should probably be tired of, but—like the perennial retellings of a really potent myth—it has a strange tendency to perpetually satisfy in some inexplicable way. I prefer Buckley’s version not just because we lost him too young at the age of 30 (he drowned in the wake of a tugboat while swimming), but also because of the tenor of his voice, which I qualify as a bit breathy. It’s a near-perfect delivery of an already haunting song that straddles the difficult space between optimism and devastation. I’m not sure if the last pages of The Avian Hourglass offers hope or not—it certainly could, depending on your reading—but I want there to be space at the end of the novel for understanding that when faced with trouble, there are always other people. And it’s through other people—one’s folk—that we might find a way through tragedy and toward something else.
Lindsey Drager is the author of (most recently) The Archive of Alternate Endings (Dzanc, 2019) and a forthcoming novel, The Avian Hourglass (Dzanc, 2024), a failed retelling of Pinocchio.