Days in the History of Silence

July 1, 2013
Eva’s elderly husband, Simon, has gradually stopped speaking—but as she recalls their life histories, we realize his silence may not be as inexplicable as it seems. Is Simon’s muteness a product of dementia, “a kind of wasteland where one’s personality is deleted,” or a revelation of his essentially silent inner self? Eva and Simon spent a lifetime keeping secrets from their daughters, including his childhood hiding from the Nazis, and her son from another relationship given away for adoption. But silence does not erase: ghosts remain, demanding to be confronted. This remarkable novel, winner of the 2012 Nordic Council Literature Prize, explores the theme of silence in many different forms—a children’s game, a refuge, a lie, a punishment, a solution—and shows its impact on those who long to be spoken to. For Eva, shut out of Simon’s inner world, “It is not simply the feeling that he is no longer there. It is the feeling that you are not either.” Lindstrom (The Guests) works in associations and superimpositions, like “a photograph that is overexposed and shows two subjects, melding in an accidental combination. As your memories do in your consciousness.” The prose is simple and elegant, revealing an extraordinary talent.

August 1, 2013
Norwegian author Lindstrom's somber novel, winner of the Nordic Council Literature Prize, centers on an aging couple who would appear to have been fortune's favorites. He is a retired physician, she a retired teacher. Together for decades, they live in bourgeois comfort, having raised three healthy (and now grown-up) daughters. But Simon is slipping into dementia, and for now, the primary symptom is a nearly unbreachable silence that began to worsen just after the couple felt forced to dismiss the Latvian housekeeper who was the closest thing they had to a friend. In the wake of that departure the wife, Eva, is left to grapple, in a way increasingly lonely and bereft, with her ever more remote husband and with the burdens of age. Both Eva and Simon have painful secrets, things they haven't confided even to their daughters, but the book is less about the secrets than about the long-term repercussions of secrecy itself. If one's survival strategy is reticence and self-protection, what happens when age and circumstance ratchet up solitude and silence to an unbearable level? Where does one turn? How does one turn? The novel is languidly paced, nearly static, and the prose can sometimes be awkward, but there are moments of emotional intensity, as when Eva drops her husband off at elder day care and hesitates before she goes, feeling that he might disappear forever when she turns. An often incisive but slow-paced exploration of the encroachments and isolations of age.

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August 1, 2013
By all accounts, Eva and Simon should be able to look back on their lives with very few regrets. Eva made a career for herself as a doting teacher, Simon became an accomplished physician, and they jointly raised three children while creating a warm and loving home. Now, with Simon's health rapidly declining in his later years, many of Eva's memories, long suppressed, begin to resurface. Between the chilling memory of a long-ago home intruder and the abrupt dismissal of a beloved housekeeper, Eva begins to wonder just how ideal her marriage really was and how many memories she and Simon have left to share. This deeply intimate character portrait dwells in the intersection of nostalgia, loss, and forgotten histories. The narrative is mainly episodic, allowing the reader glimpses into a marriage marred by depression and repression. Bruce's translation allows Lindstrm's sparse and evocative prose to shine, giving equal weight to both highly dramatic and domestically mundane events. Fans of Anne Holt, Nicholas Mosley, and Max Frisch will savor Days in the History of Silence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)