Silence in October - Softcover

Grondahl, Jens Christian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156012979 ISBN 13: 9780156012973

Publisher: Harpervia, 2002

Synopsis

After eighteen years of marriage, an art historian wakes up one morning to find his wife standing in the bedroom doorway with her bags packed, leaving him with no explanation. Alone in his Copenhagen apartment, he tries to make sense of his enigmatic marriage and life. Memories of driving a cab, quiet walks in the snow, and intense sojourns in Paris and New York pass through his mind in fleeting images. The more he thinks of his wife, however, the more mysterious she becomes to him. Slowly he realizes that two people can live together for years without ever really knowing each other, and that the most important encounters in one's life are dictated by chance, not design.
Exploring with great subtlety the secret, unpredictable connections between men and women, Silence in October is a psychological novel of immense acuity and masterful storytelling.

About this title

Review:

Jens Christian Grondahl's stunning Silence in October could easily have been an embarrassingly mawkish trawl through the psyche of an artistic man in midlife crisis. In fact, it is a hugely moving investigation into the nature of conversation, art and relationships. The unnamed narrator is a Danish art critic who wakes one day to find his wife on her way out of the door; she looks at him as he rouses, tells him that she will be away for a while, and then leaves. His children have also only recently left home and now the silence in the house seems huge. He can't work on his writing and he can't settle on anything else either. A trip to New York looms.

The novel consists of his inner monologues--wonderfully handled by Grondahl ranging, as they do, back and forth in time, in long, flowing, allusive paragraphs--his thoughts on art, life and the women he has loved. Ines broke his heart as a young man who loved too hard, too overwhelmingly; Astrid put him back together. He questions why Astrid has gone, whether she's left for good, why he did not stop her, what their relationship was really about, what its strengths were and what he's "about" without her, without the ongoing conversation that is their relationship.

This is an absolutely superb novel. Anne Born's translation rarely wobbles and the full power of Grondahl's warm and penetrating prose comes over throughout. It is always difficult to write about love and relationships without relying on clichés, reverting back to truisms and settling for the approximate, but here we have writing of precision, profoundity and earnestness. Grondahl's work is quietly awe-inspiring and Silence in October is a tremendous novel that will leave a deep impression on any reader. --Mark Thwaite

Review:

PRAISE FOR SILENCE IN OCTOBER

"The effect . . . is to draw attention to the stories we tell ourselves to sustain romance as an institution . . . and what happens when we stop believing those stories."--The Washington Post Book World

"What emerges is part psychological mystery, part philosophical rumination and part breathtaking journey through the contours of memory." --The Hartford Courant

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpervia
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0156012979
• ISBN 13: 9780156012973
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304