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ISBN-10: 0-8023-1333-7
ISBN-13: 9780802313331
Publisher: Dufour Editions
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Year: August 7, 2000
Size: 13.97 x 21.59 x 1.32cm
Number of pages: 208
Weight: 327gr
Binding: Paperback
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As with the first two books of this trilogy, The Silence also rejects the traditional modes of fiction to posit instead an essay-like novel of ideas, philosophy, and argumentation. Here the inquiring narrator explores not just European history, as he did in the first two novels, but the crimes committed by Europeans against the rest of humanity in the name of expansion and conquest. Set in northern Africa, the narrator is looking at Europe from the outside. With his friend Ali, an African revolutionary intellectual, he discusses in epic fashion the history of colonialism. He engages in imaginary conversations with Columbus, Robespierre, God, and Satan. He becomes totally immersed in what he perceives as the world's wickedness. Despite its presentation of horrors and man's inhumanity to man, and its grim portrayal of the narrator's long plunge into the tunnel of depression, The Silence does not depress. It praises man's immeasurable capacity for good. A riveting work of experimental fiction."" Library Journal
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Hope and destruction are intertwined, evil is contemplated, yet not stated, historical facts are the basis of philosophical uncertanty and diffuse political firmness. This low-pitched novel has the strength of coping with brutality with both irony and fearful seriousness. Time is not a straight line, but a melting pot of friendship, arrogance, torture and thought. The crecendo of time and history leaves room for a profound silence, fluently and mastefully communicated by one of the great authors of our time.
THE SILENCE is the last of Bjorneboe's trilogy of novels called »The History of Bestiality« and departs markedly from the preceding two. The first, MOMENT OF FREEDOM (1966), focuses on »Germania« as the outstanding source of mankind's brutality: the two world wars, the concentration camps, the racism. Bolshevism figures in it as just another face of fascism. The second novel, POWDERHOUSE (1969), delves into more remote history as it offers examples of the hero's research into the Inquisition, exposing the pious instinct as an instrument of control and the crowd mentality as a blood lust. In THE SILENCE (1973) the autobio- graphical hero finds himself in northern Africa, conversing with a character named Ali, who has much in common with Frantz Fanon. From this remote station his eyes peer at Europe, the colonializer and source of misery for the Third World. Germania no longer stands out. As Ali instructs him, the perspective inside Europe is wrong, for it holds up Hitler as a moral monster, a boogeyman, an exception to the rule; whereas, seen through the eyes of the colonialized, he is the rule--the colonial powers were equally ruthless, killed more than the Nazis and lasted longer than the Third Reich. Accordingly, the author of The History of Bestiality now catalogs the crimes of the first conquering Europeans, the Conquistadores: Cortez over the Aztecs in Mexico and Pisarro over the Incas in Peru. Incredible scenes of carnage roll across the pages with the same remorseless attention to detail and biting sarcasm as before, but with even greater urgency and rage than in the preceding novels. However, the account has become one-sided: the sacrifices of children by the pre-Columbian Indians and their pleasure in wearing human pelts replete with face and scalp until they rotted and fell away are minimized and excused by the rapacious gold-lust of the detestable foreigners.
Thus Bjorneboe arrives at a position anticipating the leftist platforms in America and Europe that dominated the last three decades of the twentieth century: Political Correctness and selective Multiculturalism. All history is reinterpreted to the detriment of the First World and to the credit of the Third. All filth and evil come from the former; all goodness and hope come from the latter; and the speaker, who happens to belong to the former, is absolved of his sins by promoting the latter. It is a sham doctrine the same as Leninism, from which it derives--the vanguard speaking for the proletariat. Yet unlike the high priests of PC, Bjorneboe is not interested in changing university curricula, dominating the scholarly press or dictating hiring practices, meanwhile winning a cushy spot for himself while stabbing non-conformist scholars in the back, but rather he retains the old fire of the sixties and finally, at long last, puts his faith in revolution. The subject peoples of the world, he asserts, the insulted and the injured, the wretched and the ragged, the downtrodden and the disadvantaged, will one day rise up to claim their freedom, their rightful portion of the Earth's bounty and their sunny place in history. The present moment is but the still--Stillheten, The Silence-- before the storm.
Given this ideology, the didactic tone and the absence of form (the novel is mostly a series of conversations) THE SILENCE should not work. And yet it is brilliant and highly readable, thanks in part to Murer's excellent translation and in part to the author's sheer inventiveness. The hero meets a penitent Christopher Columbus in the street, converses with Robespierre and debates with God, who looks like a shabby street vendor, only »without a cart.« These scenes are absolutely brilliant, and the trilogy itself, despite its flaws, voices a passion that is exceptional in world literature and a spiritual peak for mankind.
Bjorneboe did not find a solution to the problem of evil. How could he? But after reading him, one cannot fail to be a lot more distrustful of authority, a lot more skeptical of do- gooders and a lot more critical of everything. Which is good.
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