The Devastation of Silence
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
The Devastation of Silence
By (Author) Joao Reis
Translated by Adrian Minckley
Open Letter
Open Letter
7th February 2023
United States
Classifications
General
Fiction
869.35
Physical Properties
Paperback
130
Width 140mm, Height 216mm
Description
Like Louis-Ferdinand Cline meets Larry David
The 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 childhoodsthat abominable erawould 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 must seek meaning in his observations, his dreams, and, above all, silence.
Reviews
"The Translator's Bride is a neurotic little gem: fast, fun, frenzied, and feisty."--Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books
"Joo 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
"Joo 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
Author Bio
Joo 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 Prmio 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 Mrcia Barbieri (Sublunary Editions, 2023).
