Customer Reviews

Silence in October

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

Grondahl is something of a revelation... totally unknown, unreviewed, unpromoted in the US, I was lucky to find Silence in October on the shelf of my local library. After 20 pages I knew it was a book I wanted to own. I was completely immersed in the truth of the feelings described (as anyone who has been married will be) and the beauty of the language. Ms. Born has done a brilliant translation too, I doubt the prose could be more beautiful even in Danish! The only author who warrants comparison is Javier Marias from Spain - similar, but darker. I hope we will see more of Mr. Grondahl in English; otherwise I shall have to learn Danish.

If you're looking for fast-paced action, keep looking. But if you enjoy stream of consciousness narration, if you've ever looked in a mirror and wondered if the person there is truly the person you have become, well then--stop for a moment--you're about to be enthralled. 'Silence in October' is filled with delicious drop-you-in-the-scene descriptions, isolated moments that pass before they register and others that stretch out and disappear into forever. If you've ever lost someone, if you've ever been lost, if you've ever wondered how you became the person you are, if you've ever made a mistake, if you've ever committed a sin, this book will wrap itself around you and most likely will never let you go. Grondahl's use of Time and Space as a metaphor--for just about everything!--is exquisite. Do not deprive yourself of this thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Interesting. Half of our book group did not like the book at all. But upon discussion we learned that it was the central character that they disliked. The discussion was very lively which proves to me that it is a book very much worth reading. We are not supposed to like everyone we encounter in a given book, we are supposed to find characters so well drawn that we can actually form opinions about them. I thought the writing was truly elegant and I recommend it without reservation.

An author's wife leaves him and his grown-up children just as he is getting ready to leave for New York on business. (The book is mainly set in Denmark and is translated from the Danish.) The author tracks his wife's movements by watching her credit card transactions on his computer and he discovers that she is re-tracing a trip to Portugal they took together years ago. That's basically the plot. The rest of the book is a wonderful introspection of the author's life as he reflects upon his life and marriage. I've read hundreds of books and this is the most introspective and psychologically in-depth reflection of a man's life that I can recall. And it's fascinating. The moral of the story is that a woman always KNOWS. Yet even after almost three-hundred pages of brilliant introspection, this man is clueless. It has great writing. A sample: "... I vowed never again to love in vain, never again to wear my heart on my sleeve like a war veteran displaying his medals from a war no one remembered."And: "I felt hopelessly conventional, almost like a plainclothes cop, as we walked through the East Village, which seemed to be populated by a cross section of international originals, so that eccentricity had become the norm while the normal was extraordinary." Read this book.

This was my second book by Jens Christian Grondahl. I most enjoyed the part where the married man falls for the temptation of a young woman in New York, and becomes unfaithful in his otherwise happy marriage. That part showed to me that Grondahl can be fun. Basically I have detected two kinds of humour in litterature. First there is the obvious humour, the slapstick kind of humour, which is upfront and everybody can grasp it and laugh. Then there is another kind of humour, which is more subtle. The humour here is withdrawn and deep and placed in the plot. So that the humour appears in how the different events are chained together. This kind of humour not everybody detects, it's of a more sophisiticated kind than the slapstick humour. As a reader it gives me an inner smile when I read this kind of humour. Karen Blixen often uses this deep, plot driven, humour in her stories in "Winter's Tales".

Perhaps I read "Silence in October" too soon after Gabrielle d'Annunzio's "The Victim" and a couple of other classical novels, which are indeeed brilliant. So I found this reminiscence of a contemporary marriage pretty dull and deja vu. In terms of the plot, I found all that happens quite predictable. As for the theme -- two people living together without really knowing one another -- there was nothing new either. A middle aged art historian contemplates on his life after his wife left him. We learn that he met her while he was a taxi driver and married her after she became pregnant. They lived together for 18 years in relartive harmony until she unexpectedly left. Her departure in fact would not be so unexpected if the man had paid some attention to her. During the marriage, he met an artist in New York with whom he had more in common then with the wife. So he realized there could be more to life than his uneventful marriage. But the artist was not interested in a relationship so he returned to his wife as if nothing had happened. One gets the impression that there was very little passion in this man's life. We've seen this before, no? So the only thing to keep one's interest in the novel would be the depth of philosphical thought, or style, or language, or something. There is simply too little to distinguish this book from a myriad of other similar new novels. A good read if you don't get bored with repetition and a lack of depth, but eminently forgettable. I don't see this book surviving the test of time.

In October, I was spending my vacation in Sweden and Denmark. Before my trip I ran across this book and thought it would be interesting. I was spending some time in Scandinavia and wanted to read something with a different view of the world-so why not a Scandinavian author?

Upon my second night in Sweden I began reading this book. I was suprised at how the story pulled me deeper into the book. Sometimes the book seemed complex; but the story flowed so well. It's now January and I still think about this book!

This book was a great find. I hope the US publishers will print more of his books. If they don't, Mr. Grøndahl's books have been translated into German and many other languages; so I will just read the others in German.

While in Copenhagen, I made sure my friends bought the book as well for their holiday in India. This was the only English book by the author I found while in Copenhagen.