- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: Bantam (Aug 3 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0553380389
- ISBN-13: 978-0553380385
- Product Dimensions: 15.2 x 1.9 x 22.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 376 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Civil War fiction of the 1990s, following the lead of filmmaker Ken Burns and historian Shelby Foote, tends to explore hagiographic themes, espousing platitudes about political self-determination, national reconciliation, and the liberation of those in bondage. Jack Dann's The Silent is a wildly eccentric exception to this rule that reads like a prequel to R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. The novel's narrator, Mundy McDowell, is a 14-year-old witness to the fighting in the second year of what his neighbors would call "the War of the Rebellion." After sneaking away to watch the boys in gray fall in battle, Mundy returns in time to see his house burned and his mother raped and murdered by bloodthirsty Yankees. From this point on, he refrains from speaking to the strange visitors--including soldiers and the spirits of dead slaves--who start inhabiting the environs around his home.
Although written in the coarse first-person style associated with Huckleberry Finn, The Silent has a structure and imagery that can accommodate the psychological realism of Gunter Grass and Jerzy Kosinski. (In fact, Dann cites Kosinski's The Painted Bird as one of his inspirations.) If you enjoy Civil War novels but are tired of sermonizing, The Silent may be the treat you are looking for. --John M. Anderson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Dann's maudlin but sporadically engaging second novel (after The Memory Cathedral) treats the Civil War as a phantasmagoric experience and takes the form of a "therapeutical" memoir set down (in 1864!) by 13-year-old Virginian Edmund McDowell. After seeing his mother raped, both his parents murdered and his home burned by Yankee marauders on March 23, 1862, the boy retreats into speechlessness and a cloak of imagined invisibility, wandering for 75 days in a mute post-traumatic stupor through the battles ranging around Winchester, Va. The account is burdened by the repetitive, ill-defined symbolism of a "spirit dog," the ghost of a slave named "Jimmadasin" and an enigmatic icon known as "baby Jesus." InnuendoesAthat the famously rigid, religious Gen. Stonewall Jackson tipples on the side, and that McDowell's hero, Col. Ashby, is a pedophileAlend the tale neither depth nor verisimilitude. Delirious variously from fear, dysentery, ague and a primitive smallpox vaccination, the protagonist is raped by a Yankee malingerer and given his heterosexual initiation (and a dose of the clap) by a worldly teenager who consorts with runaway slaves and deserters. After witnessing oral sex between a mapmaker and his wife, he eventually is taken to the bed of his hero, Col. Ashby. No number of rapes and pillagings can bring this tedious, ahistorical novel to life.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
like cold mountain,
By
This review is from: The Silent (Paperback)
this book is a good book it reminds me of cold mountain but i like cold mountian more. the main character goes through many adventures in a journey to refind himself after he witnessed such terrible events the author does a good job potraying Mundy's adventures I particularly like his adventures with Conel Ashby this story does have to many sexual situations in it though that it can do with out only a few are important at all to the story line. but overall this is a very interesting book and unless your a fan of the book Cold Mountain you might not like this book but if you like Cold Mountian you'll probably love it
2.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting idea that lost its way,
By Paul R Sheringham (Coffs Harbour, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Silent (Paperback)
This book is interesting for the first hundred pages or so. In my opinion the narration then becomes bogged down, and the story moves at a snails pace. Mundy spends a inordinate amount of time in some scenarios, which are repititious and lost my interest as a reader. After a really good beginning this book really disappointed me greatly because I really wanted to enjoy this book.My copy had a series of questions in the back of it, as if the author thought his Civil War tome deserved to be some sort of literary classic studied in schools. I think it would be a good manuscript to be torn apart at a writers workshop. How to lose a reader's interest? How to develop paper thin characters and situations that are not fully resolved?
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Least Among Recent Civil War Novels,
By
This review is from: The Silent (Paperback)
Jack Dann's "The Silent" features a mix of overheated spiritualism, glaringly anarchronistic dialogue, and an embarrassingly voyeuristic approach to sex that left me chuckling inwardly at the same time I reproached myself for wasting my time on this bit of historical deconstructionism. Interestingly, one scene in a field hospital and another describing preparations for battle were so vivid and truthful that I was even more astounded by Dann's novelistic chicanery. Lump this in with "Cold Mountain" as one of the more wayward and self-indulgent misuses of American history in a novel.
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