The Silence: an anti-novel and absolutely the very last protocolFrom the publisher
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The Silence is the third volume in a Trilogy which also includes Moment of Freedom and Powderhouse.
"Jens Bjørneboe had one of the most incisive and adventurous intelligences of any European novelist of his time."
—Babel Guide to Scandinavian Fiction
This novel marks the apex and the culmintion of the provocative Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe's investigations into the nature of evil. Here the study moves to a broader canvas than in earlier works; the enquiring narrator explores not just European history, but the crimes committed by Europeans against the rest of humanity in the name of expansion and conquest. Cortez' destruction of the Aztec empire and Pizarro's of the Incas were crimes of genocide comparable with Hitler's against the Jews, and Columbus' glorious discovery of America becomes simply an act of colonialism: "The Indians had discovered America long before I came."
His realization of European culpability and anticipation of the blood-bath that will ensue when the Third World claims its rightful share of the world's riches lead the narrator into a long plunge into the tunnel of depression, from which he emerges in a cathartic realization that human beings have not only an unfathomable capacity for evil, but also an immeasurable capacity for good; man is the destroyer of all things, but also the renewer of all things. The twenty-five years that have passed since this novel was first published have not diminished its relevance or its urgency.
This is the third and final novel in the acclaimed "History of Bestiality" trilogy by one of Norway's most controversial and vilified authors, again translated by Bjørneboe's longtime translator Esther Mürer, whose translation "resounds with Bjørneboe's 'Florentine laughter,' maintaining a very fine line between madness and clarity, blind rebellion and pointed critique" (Anne Sabo).
The conclusion of Bjørneboe's History of Bestiality trilogy sees print in Mürer's lucid translation a quarter-century after its first publication. Like its predecessors, it is philosophical fiction concerned with human cruelty. In Moment of Freedom, the narrator was a court officer in Alpine Europe; in Powderhouse, a garbage collector in a French asylum. Now he is a tourist in North Africa. In Moment, he was obsessed with genocide; in Powderhouse, with executions and pogroms of church and state. Now he considers the crimes of European colonialism, which he discusses with gallows humor with a black African revolutionary friend as they feast on the local cuisine. On the streets, he also encounters God, Columbus, and Robespierre; with them he investigates European wanderlust and greed as well as revolution. Except in several vignettes that illustrate the ramifications of colonialism, there is even less plot than in the previous books. Nevertheless, The Silence is more absorbing, because more unsettling, than its predecessors, and it concludes in existential optimism. —Ray Olson in Booklist
Part of "The History of Bestiality" trilogy..., this is a riveting work of experimental fiction that the Norwegian-born Bjørneboe (1920-1976) completed in 1973. Over 25 years later, Mürer's flowing and eloquent translation proves that time has only sharpened its message. There is no straightforward plot. Instead, in an essaylike format reminiscent of work by Sartre and Foucault, the narrator and his friend Ali discuss crimes against humanity, such as Cortez's destruction of the Aztec empire and the genocide perpetrated against the Jews. The two friends reside in an unnamed African country beset with startling imagery that neither the narrator nor the reader can easily forget. At one point, the narrator finds a cat that has been run over lying by the road, its belly gaping and its organs exposed. An animal ambulance is called to take away the still-breathing feline and end its suffering. After ruminating about the cat's death, the narrator wonders if it symbolizes the whole history of bestiality, stating, "I simply want a rebellion against the whole world order.... Something is wrong at the very bottom. There lies the root of evil." Bjørneboe's work will continue to be studied in the literary world. Recommended for academic libraries. —Lisa Rohrbaugh in Library Journal
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This page added February 2000; updated February 2005