Jesse Ball

The disappearances of eight people from the same town baffles authorities until a confession implicates a salesman who refuses to speak, compelling a journalist to interview the condemned man's friends, family, and jailors before his execution.

Silence Once Begun

Daryl Houston

I liked this one but didn't love it. The prose by and large was workmanlike and not terribly inspiring. Some reviews suggest that it's poetic, but other than Jito Joo's letter, the prose wasn't all that poetic to my ear, and I thought her letter was overwrought and nonsensical (perhaps by design) so that it didn't really do much for me.

This is a study in unreliable narrators delving at times many layers deep as we receive the story from our author via a fictionalized version of himself via translated transcripts of copies of recordings of memories long distant and often contradictory with other accounts. Even our confessor is unreliable, and for that matter, so is, I believe, a later confessor in the book. Given that the book seems to take on the legitimacy of confession, using this old convention seems fitting enough, but does it go maybe too far?

I haven't read Kafka's The Trial, which this is reportedly a bit of a rework of. Perhaps it's better with that story as context.

The book did for the most part keep me interested, and I thought it was neat as an exercise, but I'm still sort of so-so about it having finished it.

I'm not sure Ball cashes in on the promise of the prefatory section with its significant silence and the silence of Oda Sotatsu, though maybe I've just missed some nuance.

I think my favorite part may have been the parable of the stonecutter.

Silence Once Begun

Reviews