Latest Review: "The History of Silence" by Pedro Zarraluki

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P. T. Smith on The History of Silence by Pedro Zarraluki, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, and published by Hispabooks Publishing.

Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review:

Pedro Zarraluki’s The History of Silence (trans. Nick Caistor and Lorenza García) begins with the narrator and his wife, Irene, setting out to write a book about silence, itself called The History of Silence: “This is the story of how a book that should have been called The History of Silence never came to be written. Although common, failure is not easy to explain.” I prepared for a self-aware, post-modern, and concept-heavy work. While Zarraluki never abandons his exploration of silence, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The narrator and Irene dive into the philosophies of silence, into religious ideas, into odd experiments with it, but this is a novel about relationships, about complicated, emotional, thoughtful, sexual people. Zarraluki creates whole, original characters in the brush of a couple sentences, builds their relationships with the others, and then plays out all the shades of those human interactions. It’s in the midst of that, of what people say and don’t say to each other, in the way things are said and the silence behind words, that the history of silence is uncovered.

When the pair are focused on their work of silence, they experiment and run tests—they try to not speak to each other for a week; Irene collects photos of loud events and posts them all over the apartment, till it drives their housekeeper to panic at the intensity of them. They push the boundaries of silence as they and their friends push the boundaries of relationships. The History of Silence begins in the intimacy of a single couple, moves to the intimacy that couple shares with their group of friends, and from there to the individual lines between each and every one in the group. It isn’t elaborate, it isn’t a complicated step-by-step move around the group, but a work of finesse.

Go here for the rest of the review.