From the acclaimed author of "The Memory Cathedral" comes a most powerful, haunting and unforgettable novel of the Civil War. Provocative, poetic and disturbing, "The Silent" introduces us to a young narrator whose voice rivals any in literature in bringing poignantly to life the surreal horrors of battle.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Civil War fiction of the 1990s, following the lead of filmmaker Ken Burns and historian Shelby Foote, tends to explore hagiographic themes, espousing platitudes about political self-determination, national reconciliation, and the liberation of those in bondage. Jack Dann's The Silent is a wildly eccentric exception to this rule that reads like a prequel to R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. The novel's narrator, Mundy McDowell, is a 14-year-old witness to the fighting in the second year of what his neighbors would call "the War of the Rebellion." After sneaking away to watch the boys in gray fall in battle, Mundy returns in time to see his house burned and his mother raped and murdered by bloodthirsty Yankees. From this point on, he refrains from speaking to the strange visitors--including soldiers and the spirits of dead slaves--who start inhabiting the environs around his home.
Although written in the coarse first-person style associated with Huckleberry Finn, The Silent has a structure and imagery that can accommodate the psychological realism of Gunter Grass and Jerzy Kosinski. (In fact, Dann cites Kosinski's The Painted Bird as one of his inspirations.) If you enjoy Civil War novels but are tired of sermonizing, The Silent may be the treat you are looking for. --John M. Anderson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Dann's maudlin but sporadically engaging second novel (after The Memory Cathedral) treats the Civil War as a phantasmagoric experience and takes the form of a "therapeutical" memoir set down (in 1864!) by 13-year-old Virginian Edmund McDowell. After seeing his mother raped, both his parents murdered and his home burned by Yankee marauders on March 23, 1862, the boy retreats into speechlessness and a cloak of imagined invisibility, wandering for 75 days in a mute post-traumatic stupor through the battles ranging around Winchester, Va. The account is burdened by the repetitive, ill-defined symbolism of a "spirit dog," the ghost of a slave named "Jimmadasin" and an enigmatic icon known as "baby Jesus." InnuendoesAthat the famously rigid, religious Gen. Stonewall Jackson tipples on the side, and that McDowell's hero, Col. Ashby, is a pedophileAlend the tale neither depth nor verisimilitude. Delirious variously from fear, dysentery, ague and a primitive smallpox vaccination, the protagonist is raped by a Yankee malingerer and given his heterosexual initiation (and a dose of the clap) by a worldly teenager who consorts with runaway slaves and deserters. After witnessing oral sex between a mapmaker and his wife, he eventually is taken to the bed of his hero, Col. Ashby. No number of rapes and pillagings can bring this tedious, ahistorical novel to life.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Least Among Recent Civil War Novels,
By
This review is from: The Silent (Paperback)
Jack Dann's "The Silent" features a mix of overheated spiritualism, glaringly anarchronistic dialogue, and an embarrassingly voyeuristic approach to sex that left me chuckling inwardly at the same time I reproached myself for wasting my time on this bit of historical deconstructionism. Interestingly, one scene in a field hospital and another describing preparations for battle were so vivid and truthful that I was even more astounded by Dann's novelistic chicanery. Lump this in with "Cold Mountain" as one of the more wayward and self-indulgent misuses of American history in a novel.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Civil War from a Child's perspective....,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Silent (Hardcover)
This book shows a different perspective of the Civil War. How would a child react to all the horrors of a war? Probably much like the way Mundy did...with fear, confusion, fantasy, feverish dreams.....not knowing whom to trust...guilt for not helping his parents (and others), when actually there was nothing he could have done to help. This was an accurate portrayal of a child thrown into the midst of the most horrible of conditions, and how he copes (or doesn't cope) with the madness around him. This book was very good, and I highly recommend it.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"a heartbreaking, breathtaking novel" --Douglas Barbour,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Silent (Hardcover)
The Silent is a heartbreaking, breathtaking novel, pouring a young man's traumatic responses to the Civil War into a highly specific, desperately distanced form. As with The Memory Cathedral, his novel of Leonardo da Vinci's experiences in fifteenth century Florence, Jack Dann takes us inside the life of the time, in this case a time of savage war within the American family, all the worse for that. Although The Silent is a novel full of horror, it is also a brilliantly written work with enough touches of humor and humanity to balance the brutality it renders with such grace and intensity. The Silent is a major addition to the growing library of Civil War fiction.Douglas Barbour, Edmonton Journal
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
