A Book of Silence

Starred review from September 15, 2009
After living a noisy life within a large, vocal family, and as a vicars wife and mother, Scottish writer Maitland moves to an isolated house on an English moor, where she finds bliss in solitude and silence. As a feminist and storyteller, Maitland knows that silence can be damaging; what she investigates is positive silence, the silence of contemplation and creativity, an increasingly elusive and endangered state. She delves into the richly dramatic literature of silence, from tales of the gods to spiritual reflections to drastic survival stories, and she peers into the dark side of silence, a portal to madness. Intrepid and incisive, Maitland gives herself over to silence on the Scottish island of Skye and in the Sinai desert, then identifies eight distinct experiences associated with silence, from intense physical sensations to disinhibition to a profound sense of connectedness. With the Romantic poets as her guide, she embarks on a long country walk, while pondering the Romantics belief in nature as the crucible for the inner, or true, self, and for art. As Maitland seeks to both lose and find herself in silence, she articulates a remarkably graceful and penetrating response to that mysterious and essential force.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)