A Voice Brings New Life to Literature : Reading: It was the best of times when a listener heard Frank Muller’s tape of ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ He has magic to soothe the modern world.

After I’d heard Frank Muller read “Billy Budd,” I decided to order his version of “A Tale of Two Cities.” It’s one of my favorite books, one I like to reread every few years.

The night it arrived, I could hardly wait until my husband and kids were upstairs. I brought my 6-year-old’s Fisher Price tape recorder down to the living room, turned off the lights, lay on the couch and held my breath until I heard Muller’s voice: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . .”

It was perfect.

I finished listening to the 13 1/2 unabridged hours on my commutes to work. And then I listened all over again.

When I got to the end the second time--”It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known”--I sat in the parking lot, sobbing, moved by Sydney Carton’s sacrifice for the sake of his love. Moved again by a story I had read many times before. Moved by Charles Dickens. And by Frank Muller.

Muller’s voice has made him a superstar in the taped-books business. His craggy face has also appeared on TV commercials--where he has ogled women wearing L’eggs, eaten Louis Rich turkey and joked about getting his finger stuck in a bowling ball for AT&T--and; in some live theater.

But it was his voice that gained him the loyalty of thousands of book listeners. He does the voices of scoundrels and the high-born, of young men and old, women (merely lightening his tone a bit) and children. (He even does “Hamlet,” from Gertrude to the gravedigger, all by himself.)

Muller, 40, says recording books cannot be compared to acting onstage or before the cameras. “You cannot rehearse an entire novel,” he says. “When you’re doing a 500-page book, you have some retention, but you’re actually recording in such detail--each word, each inflection. To invest that with a depth and a fullness and a life, totally off the cuff, on the run,” he says, snapping his fingers, “that’s the skill. You develop a facility that’s improvisational--the ultimate end is, you develop very good instincts and learn to trust them totally. Anything else would be wooden.

“I have a very simple rule of thumb, which is that if I’m not sure what I just read, we stop and go back,” says the Holland-born Muller, who moved to the United States at 5 and is still a Dutch citizen.

“It’s very easy for the text to go in your eyes and out your mouth, bypassing your brain. When you’re listening to a narrator, you can hear it when it happens, and I don’t want anybody to ever catch me doing that.”

Muller said that he remembers when people thought that taped books were “anti-literacy. They thought, ‘People don’t have to read anymore.’ But it doesn’t replace sitting in a comfortable chair with a book. It augments. How many people learned their love of books from being read to? I’d say a lot,” he said.

“I’m also an advocate of doing unabridged versions, because we’re working in the medium of literature, and we’re preserving every word of it. Some could say, ‘But you’re changing it, because you’re putting an interpretation on somebody’s work,’ and that’s true; a skillful actor could subvert the meaning. Therefore, we do make artistic judgments, and the listener has to judge if we are true to the author’s intent, and that is a very important consideration. . . . It’s performance and literature combined, and it’s art.”

At the Recorded Books studio in New York City, studio manager Claudia Howard says she auditions readers, “and we’re constantly looking for people who can do this. Many of the best actors I know may not be readers, and I don’t think another Frank has walked through the door.”

Muller sits in a soundproof booth, furnished with a chair, a narrow table and a metal reading light covered by a sleeve of a cotton under shirt. (“When a reader’s voice gets loud, sometimes we’d hear a ping if we don’t cover it,” says Howard.)

Outside, Howard, headset in place, faces a state-of-the-art recording system. A pair of wooden clothespins keep her copy of the book open. (Today Muller is reading “The Water-Method Man,” an early John Irving book.)

The taping is painstaking. Every few minutes, Howard stops the tape. “You’ve dropped your voice too low on the last word,” she tells him. “They’ll never hear it.”

When Muller makes a flub, Howard will stop the tape, rewind and start again. Sometimes he will ask to redo a section.

They might record 30 to 40 pages in a three-hour session. Recording is “in pieces, and you think it’s never going to hang together,” says Howard, “especially when you’re doing it a few sentences at a time.

“The illusion, of course, is, ‘They’ve done it in a single take on a single day.’ ”