As Silence in October begins, a man has just been left by his wife. She has departed with little notice and no explanation. She doesn’t say where she is going, why, or for how long.
As the author mediates on his newfound solitude, his life slowly moves forward—he travels to New York for a few days, sees his daughter in a café, etc. But his thoughts dwell mostly in the past—he recalls how he met his wife, then an earlier love affair, then episodes from his childhood. He frames, separates, objectifies his experiences as he relives them. His memories are cinematic, visual, with no assumptions about what others were thinking or feeling—or even what he himself was thinking or feeling.
The narrator makes his living as an art critic, and reading Silence in October is a bit like looking at a cubist painting. The narrator is not just remembering his past, he is creating a kind of memory collage. Past events are introduced one by one, though not in strict chronological order, and then put into rotation with other memories, as though they were I-Pod songs playing in shuffle mode. There is an obsessive, repetitious quality to this:
wife has left – how they first met –wife has left – earlier affair – how they first met –wife has left –earlier affair – parents and childhood – wife has left – how they first met – earlier affair…
It’s like watching a juggler starting with three balls and then adding a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. But if the narrator is the juggler, he is not the one who decides which ball to introduce and when. That is Grøndahl’s doing.
This is a risky way to write--Grøndahl is daring the reader to be bored as his narrator circles relentlessly around his own life and realizes how little he understands anyone or anything. Sometimes the writing tries the reader’s patience:
Perhaps she also thought of the whirling fortuitousness of it all, and perhaps with the years she thought that it is not the paths and the faces that make a difference, the paths that open out all the time in all directions, the faces that approach you all the time and pass by.
More often, though, the author’s words hold us and remind us of the ephemeral nature of our own identities and relationships. We realize that the path we walk through life is along a cliff of oblivion, and that if we don’t feel vertigo every minute it is only because we refuse to look:
It is only our own helpless lack of synchronicity, the inertia of our senses, the illusory power of memory and habit, that shields us from facing the unknown when we open our eyes in the morning, washed up on the shore of yet another alien day.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ending of Silence in October is unresolved. We have started with a woman standing over a bed, suitcase at her side, ready to leave. Two hundred and eighty pages later, we know only what her credit card statements tell us—that she has traveled from Denmark through France down to Portugal, staying in hotels.
Instead of moving forward, the story has spiralled out from a starting point in time and space, bringing in ever more information about the narrator’s experiences. We have been taking steps backward from the painting, until we can see the entire canvas.
Silence in October is kind of like chamber music, a melancholy book for a dark fall evening. Serious existential art, like Camus. Very European—it’s hard to imagine an American writing such a book today—or maybe ever
