Silence in October [Paperback]

Jens Christian Grondahl (Author), Anne Born (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This spare new novel by acclaimed Danish author Gríndahl tells the story of a dissolving marriage in a complex, elliptical and moving way. At the book's start, a Danish art historian wakes up in Copenhagen to find that his wife, Astrid, is leaving him. The novel then traces the events leading up to this separation. The art historian met his now departed wife while driving a cab to put himself through grad school; she happened to hail him the day she left her first husband. She sought refuge with her cabbie, and the two of them ended up together for 18 years. During the course of their marriage, the art historian falls in love with a sculptor while visiting New York on business. Though his great intelligence affords him many insights, it does not keep his private life from falling into disarray. Gríndahl carves out a convincing milieu for his protagonist, with numerous believable characters, including the alternately sensible and volatile Astrid and various sly denizens of the art world. Images and events from the present and the past are seamlessly blended so that single sentences or paragraphs sometimes span years. Gríndahl's Proustian game playing with the strictures of time is seductive and often captivating, a narrative tightrope that he walks without a stumble. He sprinkles the book, as well, with knowing observations about human nature, characters' perceptions of each other and memory itself, lending his tale a poetic depth that never ceases to surprise.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Celebrated Danish novelist Grmndahl makes his U.S. debut, and it is entirely welcome. His narrator is an art historian whose wife, Astrid, has inexplicably departed. Why did she leave? Will she return? These are the questions her husband ponders as he tracks her progress through Europe (via credit card use and bank withdrawals) to a place in Portugal that has special meaning for them. At the same time, he slowly sifts through his memories, recalling how they met (as a cab driver, he picked her up with her child as she was abandoning her unfaithful husband, a famous film director) and how they built a life together with a child of their own, now grown. At first, the reader's sympathies lie with the narrator, but slowly the story shifts, and he discloses an affair that Astrid may or may not have surmised. In the end, the novel reveals the complicity of both partners in making a marriage, for better or for worse. This is indeed an "October" novel, meditative, melancholic, and profoundly right in its portrait of the scrapings and balancings of married life. Not for the action crowd, this is instead highly recommended wherever people read for substance. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156012979
• ISBN-13: 978-0156012973
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #491,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterful...., April 13, 2003

By 

Michael Dupee (Moretown, VT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Silence in October (Paperback)

I generally don't read a lot of fiction unless something original about the story captivates me. I picked this one up for no particular reason and found the subject matter compelling - the odd dynamic in relationships whereby you can spend years with someone and share all levels of deep intimacy and yet still not really know them. Grondahl's work on a pure story level was incredibly satisfying, exploring the complexity of the human psyche and portraying the protagonist's deep introspection and trains of thought with wonderful skill. The story was also written in the first person with no real interference from any all-knowing narrator - no small feat.

All told, this is a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece of work. It is a book you cannot (or should not) read quickly; rather I found myself getting through chapters or even different scenes within chapters and having to stop and think about what I read.

Highly recommended!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, September 9, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Silence in October (Hardcover)

I was so gripped by 'Silence in October' that I was compelled to finish it in two days. With themes similar to that of the film 'My Dinner with Andre' and the poetry of American writer jani johe webster, this profound novel addresses the core of our being with beautiful and unrelenting questions on meaning and being. The prose is clean, and the content brings this novel into the circle of truly great literature.

The narrator's meditation on the departure of his wife, the meaning of that relationship and other 'defining' relationships, resonates with our own experience of the mystery of intimacy. Do our relationships over time define and create us, and who is the person still within, the person who might have existed had these relationships perhaps not (randomly?) happened? As the narrator reflects so astutely of his wife, 'When did it dawn on her that there was still an unknown woman trying to draw breath through her nose and mouth, a woman I had never set eyes on, behind her familar features?' The narrator, who, for undoubtedly metaphorical reasons, remains unnamed, also reflects on the passage of time, the inadeqacy of words, and most powerfully, the nature of projection onto another: 'I thought I was writing about Astrid, or about Ines and Elisabeth for that matter, but in fact I was only writing about myself, and when conversely I tried to recall my own thoughts and feelings through the years, I merely interpreted the fleeting shadows that an Elisabeth, an Astrid, and an Ines in turn threw on the valud of my skull's mumbling loneliness.'

One cannot help but read this novel and think of Andre reiterating the most essential human questions of 'Who are we? Where do we come from? And where are we going?', or the line from jani johe webster's powerful prose poem 'the weariest river,' in which she writes, 'and if there be no self discover, but rather a collection of aped masks, fastened to a dangling puppet, what then? we all have to make this search, do you think, before death nudges us for the last time?' And like the film 'My Dinner with Andre' and webster's poetry, there is, in this novel, both a disturbing, haunting element, and yet also an element of the possibility of emanicapation from our illusions.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars not a light read, September 27, 2002

By 

desiree (south carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Silence in October (Paperback)

This book ranks with Norman Rush's Mating and Tim Parks's Destiny as a deep and absorbing portrayal of a relationship viewed from the inside of one person's psyche. The main character is a man in his forties at a turning point in his marriage whose story is told very narrowly in the first person. I don't think the reader ever even learns his name. We are never told anything objectively about his experiences but Grondahl brilliantly puts us inside his head. This book requires some concentration to read since the story is so internalized but the effort is more than worth it.