A tremendous international success and a huge favorite with booksellers and critics, Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon has been one of the best-selling literary European novels in recent years. Now, in Perlmann’s Silence, the follow up to his triumphant North American debut, Pascal Mercier delivers a deft psychological portrait of a man striving to get his life back on track in the wake of his beloved wife’s death.
Philipp Perlmann, prominent linguist and speaker at a gathering of renowned international academics in a picturesque seaside town near Genoa, is struggling to maintain his grip on reality. Derailed by grief and no longer confident of his professional standing, writing his keynote address seems like an insurmountable task, and, as the deadline approaches, Perlmann realizes that he will have nothing to present. Terror-stricken, he decides to plagiarize the work of Leskov, a Russian colleague. But when Leskov’s imminent arrival is announced and threatens to expose Perlmann as a fraud, Perlmann’s mounting desperation leads him to contemplate drastic measures.
An exquisite, captivating portrait of a mind slowly unraveling, Perlmann’s Silence is a brilliant, textured meditation on the complex interplay between language and memory, and the depths of the human psyche.
*Starred Review* Invited to speak at an international conference, renowned linguist Philip Perlmann finds himself so paralyzed by grief over his wife’s recent death that he can scarcely write a word. When he solves his problem by plagiarizing from a manuscript by a brilliant foreign colleague, he finds himself trapped in an impossible dilemma after the colleague unexpectedly decides to attend the conference. Mercier draws his readers into this dilemma in a narrative taut with lethal intentions, rich with literary and linguistic implications. The implications intensify as Perlmann weighs every syllable exchanged with his now-threatening but still naive and trusting colleague, striving to keep his scholarly theft hidden, his reputation unscathed, yet hating his own deviousness. As they share agonizing days with the protagonist, readers plumb the depths of a mind endowed with rare power, a heart lacerated by tempestuous emotions. On the tightrope Perlmann walks—balancing guilt with self-justification, perilous dangers with desperate hopes—readers gain a perspective on how words unite and divide their speakers, how meanings and motives metamorphose in crossing the boundary of translation. That Mercier’s own acclaimed novel has itself traversed the boundary from German to English—thanks to the gifts of translator Whiteside—will occasion considerable gratitude among American readers. --Bryce Christensen
