Name: Days in the History of Silence
ISBN: 9781590515952

Merethe Lindstrøm

Bound together by the painful facts of their respective histories, not love, Eva and Simon discover that their past can no longer be repressed after the abrupt dismissal of their housekeeper sets in motion a disastrous chain of events. Original.

Days in the History of Silence

Emmett

Let me wax poetic about the harmonious symmetry of cover design and book. I forgot to check who was the designer, but this is wonderful. The neutral blank spaces, only slightly tinged with colour and shadow, on the front and the back, and the complementary yet contrasting light lime green on the fold inside that appear when you flip past the cover. It communicates contemplation, reserve, quiet wonder at plainness. The book looks like a Hammershoi - his paintings of sparsely furnished interior spaces, mainly walls and doorways of white or off-white, populated by lone women fully-present but heads turned or lowered, the epitome of half-glimpsed personalities, directs one's attention to the space between objects, the silence that exists in empty rooms and people one never speaks with, the surrounding lacunae in the mysterious meeting of two souls (art and its audience, the gazer and the gazed, but also subtly provoking a contemplation of passersby, people one meets in queues, clinic waiting rooms...). 

The book reads like one too. It delivers the mystery of silences and its agonies that force the main character, Eva, to examine more closely the everyday interactions between people familiar and not, and the spaces in-between conversations, actions and lack of, that things fall through. Silence is a refusal to communicate, to connect, and as Lindstrøm astutely observes, a refusal to acknowledge that affects the other party on the 'telephone line', a denial of their existence. Told from the perspective of 'the other party' throws an interesting light on the situation. This is not T.S. Eliot's socially-paralysed character who flounders in a sea of silence because he fails to "force the moment to its crisis" (Prufrock). Simon's silence is an attrition, a gradual erasure of speech until that prolonged moment of quiet, for reasons as mysterious as his smiles, or deft looks. Without the affirmation of speech, memory itself is shaken; Eva's memories and impressions of Simon become less certain, however strongly she struggles to hold on to the past. Time, like memory, is demonstratively fluid, the narrative shifting back and forth with turns of phrase to the past, then further back, then now, then last week...

More could've been done for 'this quiet but unnerving masterpiece' (not my words, quoted on the cover). There were several times I paused to admire certain sentences but for the most part I expected to be quietly but strongly moved and that emotion did not come through very often. A novel like this, which trades in the undercurrents of contemporary 'normal', 'everyday' life, requires beauty and flint-like truth for it to exist at all (and to a certain extent, make up for the lack of typical excitement; see John Williams' Stoner for an example). Details about Simon's life were supposed to be moving, but they affected me less than I would've liked to be affected. There were moments where I sat there, stunned or awed, but this meandering narrative, for its refusal to engage in proper conclusions (fitting for real life, and appreciated), was compromised by its lack of force.

Days in the History of Silence

Reviews

Highlights