Devastation of Silence
Joâo Reis
(Author)
Adrian Minckley
(Translator)
Description
Like Louis-Ferdinand Céline meets Larry DavidThe nights were terrible, during the day we were occupied, but at night we got to thinking, picturing food, our houses, food again, painful memories from our childhoods--that abominable era--would mix with images of food and our torture would grow and grow, I recalled my impotence before the plate I was ordered to clean, the impossibility of choice in a world into which I had been thrust unwillingly, war was indeed an extension of the torture of being born . . .Set during the difficult era of the Great War, The Silence Devastation is the story of a captain in the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps who, with no documents showing his rank, finds himself in a German prison camp forced to share the circumstances of his poorer countrymen. He is hungry, constantly plagued by the sound of incessant detonations--and trying to finish his oral account of a strange story about a German scientist and voice recordings. In all this, he must seek meaning in his observations, his dreams, and, above all, silence.
Product Details
Price
$15.95
$14.83
Publisher
Open Letter
Publish Date
November 08, 2022
Pages
130
Dimensions
5.4 X 8.4 X 0.5 inches | 0.4 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781948830638
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About the Author
João Reis (1985) is a Portuguese writer and a literary translator of Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic). He studied philosophy and has lived in Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and the UK. Reis's work has been compared to that of Hamsun and Kafka, and represents a literary style unseen in contemporary Portuguese writing. The Devastation of Silence, his third novel, was longlisted for Prémio Oceanos 2019. Adrian Minckley has a BA in Social Theory from the Evergreen State College, and an MA in Literary Translation Studies from the University of Rochester. Her forthcoming translations include The Whore by Márcia Barbieri (Sublunary Editions, 2023).
Reviews
"João Reis' great success in The Translator's Bride is to convince his audience that they are reading a work written at modernism's mid-twentieth-century zenith . . . pulling us out of our own times and holding us in the era of Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway."--West Camel, European Literature Network
"The Translator's Bride is a neurotic little gem: fast, fun, frenzied, and feisty."--Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books
"João Reis . . . is a great connoisseur of literary comedy, in a subtle way in which everything is so natural, but simultaneously rude, with the cruel ways in which various characters are depicted, thus creating a blackly comic web that weaves together the world of the book."--Nelson Zagalo, Virtual Illusion
"The Translator's Bride is a neurotic little gem: fast, fun, frenzied, and feisty."--Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books
"João Reis . . . is a great connoisseur of literary comedy, in a subtle way in which everything is so natural, but simultaneously rude, with the cruel ways in which various characters are depicted, thus creating a blackly comic web that weaves together the world of the book."--Nelson Zagalo, Virtual Illusion
