The Other Side of Silence

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"With years of abuse behind her and a bleak future ahead, a young German woman dreams of her country's colony in South-West Africa. When she learns of the women being transported to the colony to attend to the needs of male settlers, Hanna X takes the leap." "In Africa she is confronted with the harsh realities of colonial life. For resisting the advances of a German officer, she is banished to Frauenstein, a phantasmagoric outpost that is at once a "prison, nunnery, brothel, and shithouse." When the drunken excesses of visiting soldiers threaten the young girl who has become her only companion, Hanna revolts." Mounting a ragtag army of women and native victims of colonial brutality, she sets out on an epic journey to take on the German Reich. Combining the history of colonialism with the myths of Africa, this is a tale of suffering, violence, revenge, and love.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

… at its best, The Other Side of Silence is a novel of unforgettable power. At one point Hanna is cared for by tribal women, who nurse her body with herbal medicines and calm her spirit with their legends, assuring her that ''there is no pain and no badness that a story cannot cure.'' In the context of the novel, this statement can only seem ironic: Hanna's story certainly cannot cure its own pain and badness. Brink's purpose, however, is not to cure the evils of colonialism -- no novelist could do that -- but to probe to the deepest part of their core. — Ruth Franklin

The Los Angeles Times

This bloody fable, rooted in bloody reality, is one of Brink's most powerful works. — Michael Harris

The New Yorker

The fifteenth novel by a prize-winning South African author takes as its point of departure a German program at the turn of the twentieth century whereby women were shipped out to Germany's colonies in South-West Africa (now Namibia) to be wives -- or, failing that, sexual fodder -- for the colonizers. Brink's protagonist, Hanna X., an abused orphan from Bremen, is eager for the imagined romance of the desert, but life in the colonies turns out to be even worse than what she has known before. After she is raped and disfigured by a German officer, Hanna turns to murder, assembling a "sad menagerie" of other downtrodden people in a crusade of vigilante vengeance. Brink's powerful and brutal story is an effective response to those who suspected that the end of apartheid would leave him without a subject, and a shrewd meditation on the dehumanizing power of hatred.

Publishers Weekly

Acclaimed South African novelist Brink (The Rights of Desire; Devil's Valley; etc.) paints a harrowing picture of German South-West Africa (modern-day Namibia) in his latest novel, focusing on a German initiative to import hundreds of women to Africa for the colonists at the turn of the last century. Hanna X is an orphan who spends her early years in Germany trying to catch on as a domestic with a number of families, only to have the sexual advances of various libidinous husbands ruin her efforts to find a stable situation. Hanna thinks she has escaped the world of male domination when she receives permission to emigrate to South Africa, but her escape backfires. Raped and mutilated by brutal German officer Hauptmann Buhlke, she is taken to a horrific outpost known as the Frauenstein, where the abuse continues. The book's surreal, fragmentary first half, in which the events of Hanna's childhood are interspersed with the harrowing details of her arrival in Africa, is followed by a riveting second half, in which Hanna escapes the Frauenstein and tracks down Buhlke with the help of another abused woman, Katja, and a Herero tribesman, Kahapa, whom the two women rescue from a savage German farmer. The trio quickly become a small vigilante posse as they journey to Windhoek to find Buhlke, and their efforts to turn the tables on the Germans succeed when they murder a small troop of soldiers and then wipe out a larger group at a garrison. The relentless violence occasionally turns Hanna into a one-dimensional character, but the imagery from this haunting novel will stay with readers, as will the frightening allure of all-consuming hatred: "So beautiful. So singular. So utterly pure. So abundantly full of life." (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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