The Size of the World: A Novel [Hardcover]

Joan Silber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2008

Love and family loyalty meet up with the allure of far-off vistas in elegant new fiction by an acclaimed novelist.

A richly imagined novel—set in wartime Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Sicily, and contemporary America—about men and women whose jolting encounters with the unfamiliar force them to realize how many "riffs there are to being human." Travelers, colonials, immigrants, and returned ex-pats meet or pass one another in narratives spanning lifetimes.

In the book's opening, an engineer in Vietnam is shaken to discover why his company's planes are getting lost. A modern marriage between a Thai Muslim and an American woman leads to a terrible family fight. In 1920s Siam a young woman experiences the colonial stance of her tin-prospecting brother. The last section returns the brother to the States, older now but ever in love with Asian women.

Love, loss, yearning, self-delusion, and forgiveness are here in ways fresh and surprising. And in the tradition of E. M. Forster, seeing the size of the world changes the meaning of home-sickness for all the characters.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. War, love and culture shock take various forms, but the size of the world, in Silber's magnificent fiction, is often no larger than the distance to the person in bed beside you. Like NBA finalist Ideas of Heaven (2005), Silber's sixth work of fiction consists of interlinked stories where minor or passing characters in one piece become the narrators of others, roaming from WWII Sicily to roaring '20s Siam, and from Vietnam-era Mexico to 9/11-era Bloomington, Ind. All six stories turn on the tensions between home, exile and otherness, but to follow any of the threads would be to give away the subtle connections among the characters, from a male Sicilian-American postcolonialist professor from Hoboken to a Florida woman named Kit who can sum up an old boyfriend as the sort of boy who seemed startled when having sex. At the time his awe and confusion were endearing. The frankness of Silber's characters is deliciously at odds with the delicacy of their observations as they absorb children, affairs, fractured and repaired families and early death in environments familiar and alien to them. The characters' many lifetimes pass with a page-turning effortlessness that belies their intense, moving depths. (June)
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Review

Silber allows readers to see life as intimately knowable yet essentially mysterious. (Howard Norman - Washington Post )

Starred Review. In Silber’s magnificent fiction . . . the characters’ lifetimes pass with a page-turning effortlessness that belies their intense, moving depths. (Publishers Weekly ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (June 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039305909X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393059090
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,359,216 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joan Silber is the author of six books of fiction, most recently The Size of the World (Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Prize in Fiction) and Ideas of Heaven (Finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize). Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, two O. Henry Prize collections, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. She's known for stories that leap over long blocks of time, and this led her to write The Art of Time in Fiction. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Her website is joansilber.net.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars well told......, August 5, 2008

By 

Jean Brandt "faceinbook" (Richfield, WI United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Size of the World: A Novel (Hardcover)

Silber's novel, told in a series of short stories, brilliantly does just what the title promises.
The size of the world expands and contracts through the voices of Silber's characters. With great skill Silber weaves the lives of her characters together in such a way that, what reads like a collection of short stories, evolves into a connection which makes for a wonderful novel.
Told in the first person, each character becomes a personality in their own right, inhabiting their own geological location and their own era, yet Silber manages to connect one with another.
A wonderful story....beautifully told !
This book came to me through LibraryThing Early Reviewer's program. Being able to "preview" ARC copies is so much fun, it helps so much to be able to pass on "word of mouth" recommendations. This book gets a big thumbs up !

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Creative, August 5, 2008

By 

Cary B. Barad (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Size of the World: A Novel (Hardcover)

Tightly drawn stories in exotic milieus, with elements of humor, danger and drama. These narratives are densely packed with detail which sometimes makes for slow reading. But they're well worth the effort.

5.0 out of 5 stars Well-crafted, engrossing, and quietly moving., October 25, 2011

By 

Wobert (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Size of the World: A Novel (Paperback)

The format of loosely connected short stories that vary by geography and time period is similar to that of her earlier book, Ideas of Heaven. The settings seemed to be very well-researched and believable, although I thought there was one minor inaccuracy in the description of G-forces inside an airplane. Even though the narrative voice shifts with each story, a consistent style runs through the entire book, and repeated themes and situations provide a nice organic cohesion beyond that provided by the peripheral connections among the characters (a device that can easily become a gimmick in the wrong hands but works well here).