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Biting Silence
"Every two weeks, my wife says: I hope you're not writing another word against this regime. She says: Remember what happened to you. What we went through. I think, on account of one sentence: The true . . .' etc. I look at her, keep quiet, write and do not publish anything. I wait. Alone. In the shadows with my typewriter, a folding table, a stack of paper and a bottle, I write: To freedom, even if it lasts only fifteen minutes.'"- from Biting Silence
The journalist narrator of Biting Silence named no names and claimed no untruths in his brief editorials about high-level government corruption. He was not a radical, not a communist, less interested in politics than in writing itself. Nevertheless, his words proved the beginning of a harrowing journey from his home to a life in which prison, torture, and eventual exile became more than just words on a page.
This, the first novel from exiled Bolivian writer Arturo von Vacano, draws heavily on the author's own experience as a journalist hampered by dictatorship and forced to choose between silence and safety. It is a wrenching, provocative portrait of the collision between free expression and uneasy power. In a remarkable real-life twist, the same government that von Vacano criticizes ordered all copies of the book's Spanish-language edition burned, and, until recently, it was unavailable in its author's homeland.
Biting Silence is a searingly emotional protest against censorship and a celebration of the freedom that writing provides-a welcome discovery not only for fans of von Vacano's Latin American contemporaries, but for anyone concerned with the basic freedom to write.
Arturo von Vacano was born in 1938 in La Paz, Bolivia. He worked as a journalist in Bolivia and Peru before fleeing the country in 1980 to live in exile in the United States. He currently lives outside Washington, D.C. and works as a writer and editor for United Press International.
The journalist narrator of Biting Silence named no names and claimed no untruths in his brief editorials about high-level government corruption. He was not a radical, not a communist, less interested in politics than in writing itself. Nevertheless, his words proved the beginning of a harrowing journey from his home to a life in which prison, torture, and eventual exile became more than just words on a page.
This, the first novel from exiled Bolivian writer Arturo von Vacano, draws heavily on the author's own experience as a journalist hampered by dictatorship and forced to choose between silence and safety. It is a wrenching, provocative portrait of the collision between free expression and uneasy power. In a remarkable real-life twist, the same government that von Vacano criticizes ordered all copies of the book's Spanish-language edition burned, and, until recently, it was unavailable in its author's homeland.
Biting Silence is a searingly emotional protest against censorship and a celebration of the freedom that writing provides-a welcome discovery not only for fans of von Vacano's Latin American contemporaries, but for anyone concerned with the basic freedom to write.
Arturo von Vacano was born in 1938 in La Paz, Bolivia. He worked as a journalist in Bolivia and Peru before fleeing the country in 1980 to live in exile in the United States. He currently lives outside Washington, D.C. and works as a writer and editor for United Press International.
202 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1987
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December 9, 2008Gregory Rabassa on Biting Silence
A letter from Gregory Rabassa to Sara Bershtel, of Pantheon Books (November 21, 1981)
The author is Bolivian and therefore has perforce traveled widely due to periodic moments of exile. The book is a somewhat stream-of-consciousness narration that lies halfway between a novel and an autobiography. The author has obviously lived most of the episodes narrated, many of which are vividly cruel. The novel is really “Bolivian”, but expands out to include all of Latin America and, indeed, any other countries that fit in the exposure of dictatorial injustice and torture. The dictatorship is known as La Bestia (The Beast) and is never identified as any particular one. Von Vacano has lived under many and even gives details of the Prado sugar-coated oligarchical dictatorship in Peru.
The theme of the book can be deduced from the two epigraphs that begin it: “To freedom, even if it only lasts 15 minutes”, and “This is fiction. It has to be fiction: I am fiction.”
This mingling of fiction and fact, or fiction based on fact always gives the writer extra emphasis in saying what he must say. His experience and reading is also broad and the book is made more universal by references and comments on such as Hemingway, Verlaine, and Ray Bradbury, all very cogently tied into the story itself.
The story concerns the life of a journalist, summarized in the expression “two cells and three children”, as he counts his responsibilities. In many ways this novel has condensed the idea behind Mario Vargas Llosa’s CONVERSATION IN THE CATHEDRAL, which is the inside story of the Odria dictatorship in Peru. Von Vacano is more eloquent perhaps in that his story can cover more people and places and all the while it is autobiographical, which Vargas Llosa’s is not. Perhaps it is his being a member of the fraternity of those who have suffered that makes the book more low-keyed, subtle, less strident, and more effective. As I read it I thought that the narrator-protagonist was very much like a character from Julio Cortazar’s A MANUAL FOR MANUEL in the vagueness that only serves to underline the horror of the Beast.
The novel can be added to the growing shelf of fiction concerning dictatorship in Latin America, which has most often been the best picture and explanation of a phenomenon that politicians and historians fail to see in its true human light. This novel is very interior and even Joycean at times and in that way shows the most important effect of tyranny, which is the one it exercises on the individual rather than the amorphous collective effects,
An extremely important aspect of the novel that is also related to the individual impression just mentioned is the style, which is fluid and could be called “poetic” if that term had not become such a cliché. It has a fine rhythm in Spanish, following the essence of the language. I am reminded of the narrative style of Alejo Carpentier, who also handled shifts and modulations so well. There should be no problem in making a good, even lyrical translation of this book if the translator follows the author.
This book has many things of interest to the American reader and will be a valuable addition to and subtle counterpoint for all the looks at dictatorship in Latin America (and elsewhere).
A letter from Gregory Rabassa to Sara Bershtel, of Pantheon Books (November 21, 1981)
The author is Bolivian and therefore has perforce traveled widely due to periodic moments of exile. The book is a somewhat stream-of-consciousness narration that lies halfway between a novel and an autobiography. The author has obviously lived most of the episodes narrated, many of which are vividly cruel. The novel is really “Bolivian”, but expands out to include all of Latin America and, indeed, any other countries that fit in the exposure of dictatorial injustice and torture. The dictatorship is known as La Bestia (The Beast) and is never identified as any particular one. Von Vacano has lived under many and even gives details of the Prado sugar-coated oligarchical dictatorship in Peru.
The theme of the book can be deduced from the two epigraphs that begin it: “To freedom, even if it only lasts 15 minutes”, and “This is fiction. It has to be fiction: I am fiction.”
This mingling of fiction and fact, or fiction based on fact always gives the writer extra emphasis in saying what he must say. His experience and reading is also broad and the book is made more universal by references and comments on such as Hemingway, Verlaine, and Ray Bradbury, all very cogently tied into the story itself.
The story concerns the life of a journalist, summarized in the expression “two cells and three children”, as he counts his responsibilities. In many ways this novel has condensed the idea behind Mario Vargas Llosa’s CONVERSATION IN THE CATHEDRAL, which is the inside story of the Odria dictatorship in Peru. Von Vacano is more eloquent perhaps in that his story can cover more people and places and all the while it is autobiographical, which Vargas Llosa’s is not. Perhaps it is his being a member of the fraternity of those who have suffered that makes the book more low-keyed, subtle, less strident, and more effective. As I read it I thought that the narrator-protagonist was very much like a character from Julio Cortazar’s A MANUAL FOR MANUEL in the vagueness that only serves to underline the horror of the Beast.
The novel can be added to the growing shelf of fiction concerning dictatorship in Latin America, which has most often been the best picture and explanation of a phenomenon that politicians and historians fail to see in its true human light. This novel is very interior and even Joycean at times and in that way shows the most important effect of tyranny, which is the one it exercises on the individual rather than the amorphous collective effects,
An extremely important aspect of the novel that is also related to the individual impression just mentioned is the style, which is fluid and could be called “poetic” if that term had not become such a cliché. It has a fine rhythm in Spanish, following the essence of the language. I am reminded of the narrative style of Alejo Carpentier, who also handled shifts and modulations so well. There should be no problem in making a good, even lyrical translation of this book if the translator follows the author.
This book has many things of interest to the American reader and will be a valuable addition to and subtle counterpoint for all the looks at dictatorship in Latin America (and elsewhere).
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