The Devastation of Silence

by João Reis

Open Letter Books

The Devastation of Silence

by João Reis

Open Letter Books

Like Louis-Ferdinand Céline 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 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.

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João Reis (1985) is a Portuguese writer and literary translator. His books are published in Portugal, the USA, Brazil, Serbia and Georgia. He writes both in Portuguese and English. The Translator's Bride was his first work to be translated into English, and his novel Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow was longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. He's also the author of The Devastation of Silence (longlisted for Prémio Oceanos 2019), Quando Servi Gil Vicente (shortlisted for Prémio Fernando Namora 2020), Se com Pétalas ou Ossos (2021), Cadernos da Água (2022) and An Atavic Fear of Hailstorms (2023).

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