What do you think?
Rate this book
The Silk Road
A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literature
The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there—paths on which they still seem to be traveling.
The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit.
Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls—a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.
The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there—paths on which they still seem to be traveling.
The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit.
Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls—a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.
144 pages, Hardcover
First published March 5, 2019
48 people are currently reading
887 people want to read
About the author
Kathryn Davis
47 books182 followersKathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist.
Davis has taught at Skidmore College, and is now senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006.
Davis lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, the novelist and essayist Eric Zencey.
Davis has taught at Skidmore College, and is now senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006.
Davis lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, the novelist and essayist Eric Zencey.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 82 reviews
December 16, 2018
In her experimental novel, Davis creates a highly associative narrative, full of characters and events charged with ambiguous meanings - there seems to be no limit to the possibilities a reader has to connect the dots. When eight siblings, enigmatically called the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook are doing corpse pose at the end of a yoga class below an icy landscape (no, I am not kidding you), one of them fails to arise, and the others consequently embark on a journey in order to, well, remember her? Find her? Honor the past? Make sense of it all?
This is no traditional narrative, and the set-up itself shouldn't be taken literally, I'd suggest: We are encountering archetypes who in their travels and in small vignettes of dialogue, sometimes only a few sentences long, contemplate the human condition as such. The "labyrinth", the "mother", the "teacher" - all of them are chiffres, all places are just scenaries, all events are allegories. This author does not tell a story, she employs language to play with layers of meaning, obviously drawing from yoga philosophy and "Bardo Thodol". If you like enigmatic writing, this book is for you. Unfortunately, this kind of meandering style drives. me. nuts!
Don't get me wrong, I like Tibetan philosophy and I love yoga, but this language experiment did not manage to captivate me because to me, it didn't feel profound - probably because the level of ambiguity was just too high for my taste. If you can see almost anything in a book, you will find nothing - at least this reader didn't. I am curious whether we'll see Davis on some of next year's prize lists for experimental fiction.
This is no traditional narrative, and the set-up itself shouldn't be taken literally, I'd suggest: We are encountering archetypes who in their travels and in small vignettes of dialogue, sometimes only a few sentences long, contemplate the human condition as such. The "labyrinth", the "mother", the "teacher" - all of them are chiffres, all places are just scenaries, all events are allegories. This author does not tell a story, she employs language to play with layers of meaning, obviously drawing from yoga philosophy and "Bardo Thodol". If you like enigmatic writing, this book is for you. Unfortunately, this kind of meandering style drives. me. nuts!
Don't get me wrong, I like Tibetan philosophy and I love yoga, but this language experiment did not manage to captivate me because to me, it didn't feel profound - probably because the level of ambiguity was just too high for my taste. If you can see almost anything in a book, you will find nothing - at least this reader didn't. I am curious whether we'll see Davis on some of next year's prize lists for experimental fiction.
February 4, 2020
Review to follow. Once my brain returns to my body.
Is it possible to be so discombobulated by a book that you deeply, deeply do not understand, only catch glimpses of its (non) meaning in the fiery heat of its literary annihilation, and yet ecstatically enjoy and savour every single word, sentence, longueur?
Kathryn Davis is living proof of the writer as a shamaness, and of reading as a mystical experience. With a book like The Silk Road, you basically have to detach yourself from everything you know about reading, and just give in to the sheer experience. This is as liberating as it is terrifying.
Nadja Spiegelman’s review of The Silk Road in The New York Times (19 March 2019) has the wonderful headline: ‘A Cosmic Being Dies In Yoga Class. Then Things Get Really Weird.’ Which, when you think about it, is great publicity.
But then I don’t think Davis is much about publicity, or even readership for that matter. As long as she is able to practice her divine craft of writing, and as long as there is space in the world for writers of such temerity, then there is something good about the world.
Spiegelman hits the nail on the head about Davis: “Her writing exists outside of genre and trends and time. She operates in a mode that could be called surreal realism, where the boundaries between reality and fantasy dissolve into a place where imagination is akin to gravity and exerts a pull just as powerful.”
Just to give an indication of how slippery Davis’s writing is, I am not convinced of Spiegelman’s assertion that the eight people we encounter in a yoga class at the beginning of the book are ‘cosmic beings’. Whatever that means. There is a good argument to be made that ‘they’ are aspects of a single personality, strung through beads at different points of a divergent timeline. Or there is even a distinct possibility that they are aliens from the Boötes star system, come to observe the apocalyptic end of the world.
The characters are only referred to by labels (much as Jeff VanderMeer does in Annihilation, to which this book could be seen as a spiritual heir.) So we have the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook. And the yoga class is overseen by Jee Moon, who is “shrouded in something aqueous.” Oh, and there is a corpse at the back of the class. Go figure.
This is one of those books where to attempt any description is to invite madness. Or probably apoplexy in the person you are trying to convince. I told my partner about the book, and he did look at me as if I was mad: Why would anyone subject themselves to a reading experience that seemingly defies all logic and rationality?
But therein lies the rub: There is a fierce intelligence and a rigorous logic at work in The Silk Road, even it sticks to its own rulebook. The fact remains there is a kind of sense to be made here: Symbols, motifs, ideas appear and are refracted (there is a French-speaking dog. Don’t ask.)
And the book is also very funny and bawdy. Davis seems to be especially fond of moss: There is a wonderful scene where the Topologist is following a trail marked by cairns. We suspect this is the fabled Silk Road, although Davis asks: “How is it possible for the solid objects around us to melt away into the past, and for a new order of objects to emerge mysteriously from the future?” Ah, timey-wimey stuff, the reader crows in triumph!
Since we came from the past we knew how to look forward, but it was possible one of us came from the future, too, and when that happens it’s possible to see what it was like before there was anything, anything at all. To which Davis appends politely: Not the one with two hearts, though—not that one. It’s possible the one who came from the future didn’t have a heart.
The Topologist describes her experience of the trail:
If anything, it was resilient underfoot, a moist web of vegetation, pale green and translucent like a luna moth’s wings. While she walked, the Topologist felt herself becoming aroused. It was as if whatever lay beneath her had its attention fixed amorously on the cleft between her legs. She felt like she was naked from the waist down, hungrily observed and getting wet, her breath coming faster and faster.
Walking can do that, said the Keeper. It’s perfectly normal. She was trying to be reassuring, like a mother.
Sphagnum subnitens, said the Iceman. Glittering sphagnum. All it thinks about is sex.
Later on we learn that the Astronomer “kept a terrarium in the Morning Room with different kinds of moss in it, a sexual generation of mosses including male and female sex organs alike, living things in some cases so little their sex parts could not be seen at all.” I have no idea if Davis is kidding or not about moss genitalia. Though I did read elsewhere that her 2006 book The Thin Place has a lichen as a character (the only other book of hers I have read is the equally delirious and baffling, yet achingly beautiful, Duplex from 2013.)
So what is the Silk Road? (Not to mention the Savage Domain, presided over by a monstrous dog-headed beast. And what is it with the mysterious plague that seems to have wiped out humanity? The below seems to be Davis’s only concession to any kind of conventional explanation:
Human beings have always moved from place to place, whether by design or due to the unforeseen, droughts and wars, pestilence and persecution, the Silk Road they traveled on a conduit not merely for precious commodities, for spices and jewels, mirrors and honey, but for everything strange or unknown, a variety of alien gods and ideas, an unbounded universe with nothing outside it, the dung-covered eggs of the silkworm.
Is it possible to be so discombobulated by a book that you deeply, deeply do not understand, only catch glimpses of its (non) meaning in the fiery heat of its literary annihilation, and yet ecstatically enjoy and savour every single word, sentence, longueur?
Kathryn Davis is living proof of the writer as a shamaness, and of reading as a mystical experience. With a book like The Silk Road, you basically have to detach yourself from everything you know about reading, and just give in to the sheer experience. This is as liberating as it is terrifying.
Nadja Spiegelman’s review of The Silk Road in The New York Times (19 March 2019) has the wonderful headline: ‘A Cosmic Being Dies In Yoga Class. Then Things Get Really Weird.’ Which, when you think about it, is great publicity.
But then I don’t think Davis is much about publicity, or even readership for that matter. As long as she is able to practice her divine craft of writing, and as long as there is space in the world for writers of such temerity, then there is something good about the world.
Spiegelman hits the nail on the head about Davis: “Her writing exists outside of genre and trends and time. She operates in a mode that could be called surreal realism, where the boundaries between reality and fantasy dissolve into a place where imagination is akin to gravity and exerts a pull just as powerful.”
Just to give an indication of how slippery Davis’s writing is, I am not convinced of Spiegelman’s assertion that the eight people we encounter in a yoga class at the beginning of the book are ‘cosmic beings’. Whatever that means. There is a good argument to be made that ‘they’ are aspects of a single personality, strung through beads at different points of a divergent timeline. Or there is even a distinct possibility that they are aliens from the Boötes star system, come to observe the apocalyptic end of the world.
The characters are only referred to by labels (much as Jeff VanderMeer does in Annihilation, to which this book could be seen as a spiritual heir.) So we have the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook. And the yoga class is overseen by Jee Moon, who is “shrouded in something aqueous.” Oh, and there is a corpse at the back of the class. Go figure.
This is one of those books where to attempt any description is to invite madness. Or probably apoplexy in the person you are trying to convince. I told my partner about the book, and he did look at me as if I was mad: Why would anyone subject themselves to a reading experience that seemingly defies all logic and rationality?
But therein lies the rub: There is a fierce intelligence and a rigorous logic at work in The Silk Road, even it sticks to its own rulebook. The fact remains there is a kind of sense to be made here: Symbols, motifs, ideas appear and are refracted (there is a French-speaking dog. Don’t ask.)
And the book is also very funny and bawdy. Davis seems to be especially fond of moss: There is a wonderful scene where the Topologist is following a trail marked by cairns. We suspect this is the fabled Silk Road, although Davis asks: “How is it possible for the solid objects around us to melt away into the past, and for a new order of objects to emerge mysteriously from the future?” Ah, timey-wimey stuff, the reader crows in triumph!
Since we came from the past we knew how to look forward, but it was possible one of us came from the future, too, and when that happens it’s possible to see what it was like before there was anything, anything at all. To which Davis appends politely: Not the one with two hearts, though—not that one. It’s possible the one who came from the future didn’t have a heart.
The Topologist describes her experience of the trail:
If anything, it was resilient underfoot, a moist web of vegetation, pale green and translucent like a luna moth’s wings. While she walked, the Topologist felt herself becoming aroused. It was as if whatever lay beneath her had its attention fixed amorously on the cleft between her legs. She felt like she was naked from the waist down, hungrily observed and getting wet, her breath coming faster and faster.
Walking can do that, said the Keeper. It’s perfectly normal. She was trying to be reassuring, like a mother.
Sphagnum subnitens, said the Iceman. Glittering sphagnum. All it thinks about is sex.
Later on we learn that the Astronomer “kept a terrarium in the Morning Room with different kinds of moss in it, a sexual generation of mosses including male and female sex organs alike, living things in some cases so little their sex parts could not be seen at all.” I have no idea if Davis is kidding or not about moss genitalia. Though I did read elsewhere that her 2006 book The Thin Place has a lichen as a character (the only other book of hers I have read is the equally delirious and baffling, yet achingly beautiful, Duplex from 2013.)
So what is the Silk Road? (Not to mention the Savage Domain, presided over by a monstrous dog-headed beast. And what is it with the mysterious plague that seems to have wiped out humanity? The below seems to be Davis’s only concession to any kind of conventional explanation:
Human beings have always moved from place to place, whether by design or due to the unforeseen, droughts and wars, pestilence and persecution, the Silk Road they traveled on a conduit not merely for precious commodities, for spices and jewels, mirrors and honey, but for everything strange or unknown, a variety of alien gods and ideas, an unbounded universe with nothing outside it, the dung-covered eggs of the silkworm.
abandoned-on-hold
December 5, 2018I read the first 40 pages of this slim book twice. While it did become somewhat more penetrable the second time around, it shall remain "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" and not one that has made me curious enough to continue on in this state of confusion for 100 or so more pages.
Throw the poor reader a lifeline Ms Davis, sexy moss is just not enough.
Throw the poor reader a lifeline Ms Davis, sexy moss is just not enough.
March 30, 2019
As with my other Kathryn Davis experiences, it's often hard to tell what's going on. But who cares when one can get lost in sentences like:
The Topologist could feel the Botanist scrutinizing her for a sign of whatever it was that had turned her from a stern-faced girl with dark brows and thin brown hair and a long upper lip, a string bean of a girl wearing pale blue cat's-eye glasses, into what she was now, a tube of skin that could be stretched into a torus to contain an entire universe.Ok!
March 1, 2025
Like hiking between cairns in heavy fog, there's continuity but by the time you reach the next one the last has been l0st to obscurity behind. I tried to listen to this as an audionbook but in that form it was impossible to keep sight of the trail at all.
"The spirit of the age was compounded of arrogance and inattention."
"The spirit of the age was compounded of arrogance and inattention."
January 8, 2020
A lyrical engagement with time, mortality, imagination, and archetypes, Kathryn Davis's The Silk Road is strange, haunting, and smart, its gorgeous, lyrical, evocative prose reminiscent of Rikki Ducornet, John Hawkes, and Virginia Woolf's writing.
December 8, 2018
What in the actual. hell. did I just read?
Alright so I've done something with this book that I would never normally do: reread it immediately upon finishing. I had to because I've never been so uncertain about plot in something that is this clearly written. The Silk Road is a very strange beast. Each sentence is incredibly rendered with needle-tip precision but put each one together and things quickly get... weird.
Here's what it's like: an off-beat alt-pop song that's been glitched the shit out of by a twitchy producer.
So what is it about? Well, to start, it's sort of an atmospheric travelogue, centered around individual moments, with one of the several characters encountering something odd in an increasingly unfamiliar landscape. And many of these episodes are from their childhood so in many ways it reminded me of The Waves.
But it's not some ethereal meditation, because there's also a bonkers exodus to.. somewhere.. from something I don't want to spoil? It's entirely possible that is a surreal re-telling of something that I'm missing the cues for and yet it's so enjoyable standalone.
File this one under: the less you know the better.
I cannot wait for this to come out in 2019 (this was an ARC from Indiespensable) because I want to talk about it with everyone and I have so many questions (spoilered, below). If you read this review and you have answers to these questions, please let me know what you think. Because perhaps Davis just wove some writing magic on me and this is all a bunch of pretentious nonsense. But I have a feeling it might be the most brilliant thing I read this year.
And I want to read it again because I'm sure I missed things the second time around too. If that's not an endorsement, I don't know what is.
Questions:
Alright so I've done something with this book that I would never normally do: reread it immediately upon finishing. I had to because I've never been so uncertain about plot in something that is this clearly written. The Silk Road is a very strange beast. Each sentence is incredibly rendered with needle-tip precision but put each one together and things quickly get... weird.
Here's what it's like: an off-beat alt-pop song that's been glitched the shit out of by a twitchy producer.
So what is it about? Well, to start, it's sort of an atmospheric travelogue, centered around individual moments, with one of the several characters encountering something odd in an increasingly unfamiliar landscape. And many of these episodes are from their childhood so in many ways it reminded me of The Waves.
But it's not some ethereal meditation, because there's also a bonkers exodus to.. somewhere.. from something I don't want to spoil? It's entirely possible that is a surreal re-telling of something that I'm missing the cues for and yet it's so enjoyable standalone.
File this one under: the less you know the better.
I cannot wait for this to come out in 2019 (this was an ARC from Indiespensable) because I want to talk about it with everyone and I have so many questions (spoilered, below). If you read this review and you have answers to these questions, please let me know what you think. Because perhaps Davis just wove some writing magic on me and this is all a bunch of pretentious nonsense. But I have a feeling it might be the most brilliant thing I read this year.
And I want to read it again because I'm sure I missed things the second time around too. If that's not an endorsement, I don't know what is.
Questions:
November 10, 2018
DNF. Got over halfway through and realized I was wasting my time. A review mentioned it putting the reader into a kind of fugue state and if you enjoy that kind of thing, you might like this book. You will have no clue what this story is about, when it is, where it is, what the plot is (is there one?). I prefer my fugue states to involve not thinking so hard. It's why I tend to avoid poetry in my free time.
December 20, 2022
Weirdest book I've ever read
So, obviously, I loved it.
It's clear that this book has gathered some lower ratings because it's absolutely not for everyone. Even those of us who truly love this style of writing can never be sure if we interpret any of it correctly. Perhaps this is the point. Maybe not knowing is another part of the experience. Certainly, the whole thing feels interactive to me. The themes are layered, but also pretty universal when you boil them down: life is about journeys, and no matter how crazy it gets, you still have to deal with ordinary stuff. Sure, people and places are different, as well as time periods, but no one transcends their mortality.
The foremost thing you need to know is that this is an intentionally surreal novel. The reader is expected to feel confused, adrift, and in the dark. I love this kind of writing, where you just have to let the entirety of it wash over you in waves, to see what you absorb of it.
By simply reading along, savoring descriptions of moments and fleeting feelings, an interpretation of events may come to you. That's what the mind does: it tries to make sense of, to create order out of, chaos and unbound, ungrasped things.
The first thought I had was that this was some kind of outer body experience, even an afterlife. Then, I started to think about the story (as much as there is a kind of loosely gathered narrative) as a point in the future where we suddenly all move backward rapidly. You'd think this wouldn't be so hard. We know what came before, but what if this great reversal also involved a kind of great unraveling of not just time, but also place and memory, such that only snatches of recognition and remembrance are possible, and nothing can be held onto for long.
Imagine how disoriented and acutely vulnerable you might feel, combined with a burning curiosity to *know* which keeps you moving in any direction, and causes you to grab onto anything that seems resonant and to plumb it for meaning.
Later, the narrator says that time is moving in a forward direction, because they see signs of deterioration, but they also seem to be moving backwards through individual and collective memory. Also, there is a prevailing theory that at the end of it all, time will move in every direction in one healing burst, though there's absolutely no sign of a redemption arc in this story, at least not for these characters.
And later still, the narrator says "we were all caught in the flood of time," which might be a clue. That clue, of course, could be that I'm severely overthinking this. It would not be the first time.
Each character can be tied logically to the past or present, one of the few characteristics the author takes pains to point out. The author tends to highlight opposite pairings: present and past, living and dead, collision and cleanup.
As for "the creature," it might represent danger. If you look right at it, it's as if it doesn't exist, isn't real, or more accurately represents the absence of reality, though you've surely sensed its presence. It's hard to really see, to anticipate, gathering dangers in the future. It's much much easier to see and describe in detail, dangers that have already happened.
All of the characters are interesting, but the character of the poet intrigued me because she seems most like a cat: aloof, selfish, likes attention but not too much, and capable of casual cruelty.
The whole time I'm trying to figure out if the characters are the remnant souls after death (which would explain the emphasis on pathways, excursions, and pilgrimages, not to mention the otherworldliness of the narrative) the author is interrogating a more metaphysical question: What does it mean to be alive, and what is the nature of life and death?
This novel is definitely a trip.
So, obviously, I loved it.
It's clear that this book has gathered some lower ratings because it's absolutely not for everyone. Even those of us who truly love this style of writing can never be sure if we interpret any of it correctly. Perhaps this is the point. Maybe not knowing is another part of the experience. Certainly, the whole thing feels interactive to me. The themes are layered, but also pretty universal when you boil them down: life is about journeys, and no matter how crazy it gets, you still have to deal with ordinary stuff. Sure, people and places are different, as well as time periods, but no one transcends their mortality.
The foremost thing you need to know is that this is an intentionally surreal novel. The reader is expected to feel confused, adrift, and in the dark. I love this kind of writing, where you just have to let the entirety of it wash over you in waves, to see what you absorb of it.
By simply reading along, savoring descriptions of moments and fleeting feelings, an interpretation of events may come to you. That's what the mind does: it tries to make sense of, to create order out of, chaos and unbound, ungrasped things.
The first thought I had was that this was some kind of outer body experience, even an afterlife. Then, I started to think about the story (as much as there is a kind of loosely gathered narrative) as a point in the future where we suddenly all move backward rapidly. You'd think this wouldn't be so hard. We know what came before, but what if this great reversal also involved a kind of great unraveling of not just time, but also place and memory, such that only snatches of recognition and remembrance are possible, and nothing can be held onto for long.
Imagine how disoriented and acutely vulnerable you might feel, combined with a burning curiosity to *know* which keeps you moving in any direction, and causes you to grab onto anything that seems resonant and to plumb it for meaning.
Later, the narrator says that time is moving in a forward direction, because they see signs of deterioration, but they also seem to be moving backwards through individual and collective memory. Also, there is a prevailing theory that at the end of it all, time will move in every direction in one healing burst, though there's absolutely no sign of a redemption arc in this story, at least not for these characters.
And later still, the narrator says "we were all caught in the flood of time," which might be a clue. That clue, of course, could be that I'm severely overthinking this. It would not be the first time.
Each character can be tied logically to the past or present, one of the few characteristics the author takes pains to point out. The author tends to highlight opposite pairings: present and past, living and dead, collision and cleanup.
As for "the creature," it might represent danger. If you look right at it, it's as if it doesn't exist, isn't real, or more accurately represents the absence of reality, though you've surely sensed its presence. It's hard to really see, to anticipate, gathering dangers in the future. It's much much easier to see and describe in detail, dangers that have already happened.
All of the characters are interesting, but the character of the poet intrigued me because she seems most like a cat: aloof, selfish, likes attention but not too much, and capable of casual cruelty.
The whole time I'm trying to figure out if the characters are the remnant souls after death (which would explain the emphasis on pathways, excursions, and pilgrimages, not to mention the otherworldliness of the narrative) the author is interrogating a more metaphysical question: What does it mean to be alive, and what is the nature of life and death?
This novel is definitely a trip.
June 3, 2019
Can literature be a weed? An existence you can’t decide is so beautiful you refuse to yank it from the garden? Or a weed so quickly pulled the earth screams and the dirt falls like dark tears? What does one do with Kathryn Davis? Four novels into her eight novel career and I am lost. At a loss. Is she America’s Ali Smith? But more. I read lines that feel like a snort of coke and they wake me, shake me. I read lines and I stare out into the universe like the weed was real bad or too good. Ms Davis, you get me. You get lost in me. I get lost. I wander. I am a soul in your labyrinth. If I were a braver soul, I’d worship you as a Christ.
January 13, 2019
Kathryn Davis is one of those authors who takes me completely out of myself and into a parallel world where time is fluid, magic abounds and characters are mercurial. The Silk Road is a book that feels like a marvelous dream, taking the reader from a frozen land of future, to the childhood neighborhood of the past, to a walking tour through the present. Everything feels Topsy-turbulent, hard to hang on to, but in a way that compelled me deeper and deeper into the dream. The characters are archetypal, unnamed, slowly distinguishing themselves as the book travels back and forth through time. Davis reveals their secrets slowly.
As soon as I finished The Silk Road, I knew it was a book I will return to again when the weight of my world is too much and I want to be swept away into this magical space once more.
As soon as I finished The Silk Road, I knew it was a book I will return to again when the weight of my world is too much and I want to be swept away into this magical space once more.
July 17, 2019
So we're agreed?
All of us?
This is perhaps the most surreal, dissociative book I've ever read. It's about death, and memory, and...That's it. That's all I know! There is a story-line. I just...can't...quite...see what the story...is? Maybe that's on me. (And maybe July was the worst possible time to read this.) According to the author's note at the end, much of the text was previously published in various short stories, so maybe that explains it. Maybe it's not even supposed to make sense.
I love her writing though. I could be wrong, but I get the sense Davis was influenced by Anna Kavan. (If not, read Kavan, Kathryn Davis! You'll love her!)
And come winter, I recommend you all read The Silk Road. I look forward to hearing your smart people thoughts.
All of us?
This is perhaps the most surreal, dissociative book I've ever read. It's about death, and memory, and...That's it. That's all I know! There is a story-line. I just...can't...quite...see what the story...is? Maybe that's on me. (And maybe July was the worst possible time to read this.) According to the author's note at the end, much of the text was previously published in various short stories, so maybe that explains it. Maybe it's not even supposed to make sense.
I love her writing though. I could be wrong, but I get the sense Davis was influenced by Anna Kavan. (If not, read Kavan, Kathryn Davis! You'll love her!)
And come winter, I recommend you all read The Silk Road. I look forward to hearing your smart people thoughts.
November 6, 2023
Baffling metempsychosis (?) allegory (??). Begins well enough, although by the end I felt more than a little shortchanged by the vagueness of it all. I've really enjoyed the other Kathryn Davis books I have read but this one just didn't click. Give her excellent Duplexa read instead.
April 23, 2024
This is the first of Kathryn Davis’s novels that I’ve read (her eighth of eight). It’s a novel to surrender to. I was bewildered and yet trusting, partly due to the lack of showiness, partly because I was invited on an impossible journey, a quest without a goal, and I was also bewitched by the quality of the prose as well as the literary references and parodic elements, also done in a quiet manner.
It can be a wonderful reading experience to care little about content, either plot or character or theme: the good (and, at least for me, fresh) enigmatic.
It can be a wonderful reading experience to care little about content, either plot or character or theme: the good (and, at least for me, fresh) enigmatic.
March 7, 2025
"When you arrive at the edge of the world you stop remembering things like how you got there. Your attention keeps pouring over the edge, out and away from the footprints left behind you in the snow, unable to focus on anything except the cove of sparkling light there at the foot of the escarpment. It was either a real pool full of something like water—we were in agreement on that if nothing else—or just a gathering of attention, all of it in one place, as solid and bright-surfaced as a jewel but otherwise beside the point."
July 30, 2024
Fleeting plot about grief with several, unnamed but labeled by their professions, characters. A person, perhaps a sibling dies at the beginning and the narrator takes us on an excursion literally and figuratively. It's a book of feeling and thinking rather than any particular action.
November 14, 2019
The Silk Road is set within an interstitial place, somewhere between dream and reality, between the conscious and unconscious, in between anything that allows for something to fit within it. Reading Kathryn Davis' writing in this novel is like falling asleep to music or the sound of conversation; as the mind drifts into deep sleep, the real auditory sounds produce images in the mind - dreams - and the words or music one hears begins to blur within the subconscious of the sleeping mind. As you might be able to guess from what I've written so far, you might be able to tell that the narrative and plot of The Silk Road is not formal, and neither are any other parts of the story, save maybe the characters.
"When you arrive at the edge of the world you stop remembering things like how you got there. Your attention keeps pouring over the edge, out and away from the footprints left behind you in the snow, unable to focus on anything except the cove of sparkling light there at the foot of the escarpment. It was either a real pool full of something like water - we were in agreement on that if nothing else - or just a gathering of attention, all of it in one place, as solid and bright-surfaced as a jewel but otherwise beside the point." (20)
From what I gather, the characters are part of a family. None have real names except for Jee Moon. The others are characters such as those named in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Davis refers to them as The Archivist, The Botanist, The Cook, The Keeper, The Geologist, The Geographer, The Topologist, The Astronomer... and so on.
I so enjoyed The Silk Road for the relationships between the characters, the family. All of them, despite their petty and subtle arguing, deviations of thought from this to that, different conclusions of understanding and comprehension, indeed different levels of intelligence in general, had a very peculiar way of granting pardon and forgiveness to one another. It was as if, despite the craziness that lived within each of them as they lived side by side, that indeed might come off to outsiders as a family of lunatics, they all were able to tolerate one another if not with patience then with consideration.
What came off as a jarring brush of avant-garde pretentiousness (in terms of style) at first, disappeared just as quickly as the thought occurred, and I found myself being OK with not grasping a single comprehensive chronological structure. Moreover, I found myself letting go, giving myself to the text rather than letting myself rule the text as a reader. In so doing I abandoned myself to the text as a meditation or exercise in which I had to labor very little. On the downside I have almost nothing to say regarding the meaning of The Silk Road, and simply and not at all superficially have enjoyed it for it's aesthetic qualities.
The Silk Road is very visual, the words almost becoming a texture of the visible:
"It had gotten to be very late, so late it was almost early. The wind was coming from the west, rattling the windowpanes; we could see the Keeper buffeted by it as she made her way along the path to the stables. Soon it would be dawn, the planet tipping away from the universe and toward the bright center of its own system. Soon it would be time to feed the animals." (104)
"The wish to fill the empty space between one place and the next was overwhelming. It was an impulse having less to do with wanting to see things, what was next, around the bend, than with trying to make time contiguous. The sun brightened, releasing mist from the road, smells of sweat and damp wool." (106)
I'm less interested in the allegorical potential of The Silk Road then I am with the writing itself. The writing seems to reinvent the stream of consciousness style dominated by the Beatniks of the 1950s, creating something for those lovers of science fiction and fantasy, doing something for those forms without falling into genre rules. Davis, instead, breaks them. And she does so with grace, making a new, fantastic instrument of the broken pieces made up of linguistic tones and representations: The Silk Road itself.
"When you arrive at the edge of the world you stop remembering things like how you got there. Your attention keeps pouring over the edge, out and away from the footprints left behind you in the snow, unable to focus on anything except the cove of sparkling light there at the foot of the escarpment. It was either a real pool full of something like water - we were in agreement on that if nothing else - or just a gathering of attention, all of it in one place, as solid and bright-surfaced as a jewel but otherwise beside the point." (20)
From what I gather, the characters are part of a family. None have real names except for Jee Moon. The others are characters such as those named in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Davis refers to them as The Archivist, The Botanist, The Cook, The Keeper, The Geologist, The Geographer, The Topologist, The Astronomer... and so on.
I so enjoyed The Silk Road for the relationships between the characters, the family. All of them, despite their petty and subtle arguing, deviations of thought from this to that, different conclusions of understanding and comprehension, indeed different levels of intelligence in general, had a very peculiar way of granting pardon and forgiveness to one another. It was as if, despite the craziness that lived within each of them as they lived side by side, that indeed might come off to outsiders as a family of lunatics, they all were able to tolerate one another if not with patience then with consideration.
What came off as a jarring brush of avant-garde pretentiousness (in terms of style) at first, disappeared just as quickly as the thought occurred, and I found myself being OK with not grasping a single comprehensive chronological structure. Moreover, I found myself letting go, giving myself to the text rather than letting myself rule the text as a reader. In so doing I abandoned myself to the text as a meditation or exercise in which I had to labor very little. On the downside I have almost nothing to say regarding the meaning of The Silk Road, and simply and not at all superficially have enjoyed it for it's aesthetic qualities.
The Silk Road is very visual, the words almost becoming a texture of the visible:
"It had gotten to be very late, so late it was almost early. The wind was coming from the west, rattling the windowpanes; we could see the Keeper buffeted by it as she made her way along the path to the stables. Soon it would be dawn, the planet tipping away from the universe and toward the bright center of its own system. Soon it would be time to feed the animals." (104)
"The wish to fill the empty space between one place and the next was overwhelming. It was an impulse having less to do with wanting to see things, what was next, around the bend, than with trying to make time contiguous. The sun brightened, releasing mist from the road, smells of sweat and damp wool." (106)
I'm less interested in the allegorical potential of The Silk Road then I am with the writing itself. The writing seems to reinvent the stream of consciousness style dominated by the Beatniks of the 1950s, creating something for those lovers of science fiction and fantasy, doing something for those forms without falling into genre rules. Davis, instead, breaks them. And she does so with grace, making a new, fantastic instrument of the broken pieces made up of linguistic tones and representations: The Silk Road itself.
January 18, 2019
Past, present, and future blend in this literary science-fiction. An allegory novel that evokes the Canterbury Tales, the book unfolds in the stories told by the occupants of a seemingly post-apocalyptic shelter. Reality and memory weave in and out as each resident recounts the journey that led them here, and their experiences of the present intertwine. The story comes together like a tapestry, woven of many different pieces. One of those books that should be read and read again, and each reading will reveal new gems of interpretation and nuance.
April 4, 2019
elliptical and dreamlike. gorgeous prose.
May 19, 2020
As always, Davis' writing is luminous, mysterious, delving into what can't be known. The story--is there a story?--baffled me. Time is slippery, we all know that, and identity. And symbols hover over every action, every encounter, every object that vibrates between material and imagined. Can we ever be sure?
It seems not--but we probably all know that too, however we may act in public.
Are we ourselves, one self?-- or a composite of multiple identities, finely honed and defined, named, by the situation at hand, by our relationships with the rest of the slippery world. What is inherited, what ordained? What invented by comedy or tragedy?
And just who is Jee Moon?
I think I will need to read this again.
It seems not--but we probably all know that too, however we may act in public.
Are we ourselves, one self?-- or a composite of multiple identities, finely honed and defined, named, by the situation at hand, by our relationships with the rest of the slippery world. What is inherited, what ordained? What invented by comedy or tragedy?
And just who is Jee Moon?
I think I will need to read this again.
July 17, 2019
Perhaps this is the most elusive book I have read. It is the sort of book I would normally have put down, except I had promised a friend we would discuss it after reading it together.
It is challenging to read Davis. Her places, characters, and activities are symbolic, or allegorical. But their hidden meaning resists interpretation. Like finding an ancient book, but lacking a Rosetta stone to facilitate translation.
At various times I thought:
1. The eight primary characters were aspects of a single person who had died.
2. The eight characters were siblings who had all been killed by an escaped prisoner, while they were out on a walk with their mother.
3. The eight characters were being mixed together to be reincarnated back into the world as a single person.
4. Jee Moon was a caretaker and guide.
5. Jee Moon was an outside force who had interrupted the character’s normal fates.
The narrator is never identified. It is not 3rd person omniscient. It seems to be a 1st person plural narrator, who shares the same memories and experiences as the eight characters.
It is challenging to read Davis. Her places, characters, and activities are symbolic, or allegorical. But their hidden meaning resists interpretation. Like finding an ancient book, but lacking a Rosetta stone to facilitate translation.
At various times I thought:
1. The eight primary characters were aspects of a single person who had died.
2. The eight characters were siblings who had all been killed by an escaped prisoner, while they were out on a walk with their mother.
3. The eight characters were being mixed together to be reincarnated back into the world as a single person.
4. Jee Moon was a caretaker and guide.
5. Jee Moon was an outside force who had interrupted the character’s normal fates.
The narrator is never identified. It is not 3rd person omniscient. It seems to be a 1st person plural narrator, who shares the same memories and experiences as the eight characters.
July 19, 2025
A murder mystery where the whodunit is the least mysterious part of it.
May 15, 2019
An interesting novel, but not as interesting as the NYTimes made it sound.
November 9, 2018
This is impressively done, but it certainly is a bit discombobulating as well. I’m sure I only got a portion of it. Perhaps a bit too conceptual for me to follow, I still enjoyed reading.
August 19, 2019
This novel is like reading a recount of a dream you've had. Settings blend into each other, characters disappear when you turn around. There is some vague string of a plot, but it's one driven by general feeling and atmosphere more than concrete events.
It takes place in a post-climate-crisis-dystopia/medieval Europe/arctic village and discusses mortality/voyeurism/organised religion/family/psychosexual development. The ending definitely felt sad but I'm not sure why.
The book becomes more enjoyable in the second half. I had stopped worrying about trying to piece together what was happening at that point. In turn, the book's intentions and message became more clear. Allow yourself to not "get it", and you'll find it makes more sense.
If you're going to read this book, expect a long poem rather than a story.
It takes place in a post-climate-crisis-dystopia/medieval Europe/arctic village and discusses mortality/voyeurism/organised religion/family/psychosexual development. The ending definitely felt sad but I'm not sure why.
The book becomes more enjoyable in the second half. I had stopped worrying about trying to piece together what was happening at that point. In turn, the book's intentions and message became more clear. Allow yourself to not "get it", and you'll find it makes more sense.
If you're going to read this book, expect a long poem rather than a story.
July 24, 2020
OMG this is complete torture. I got to 37 percent and I am completely clueless on what this is about. There is absolutely NO STORY NO PLOT and the reader is completely BORING> I read every day and listen to audio books while doing chores and cooking but this is completely not worth anyone's time. I bailed and usually I will attempt later because most of the time it is do to my own psyche but I shall never ever listen or read this or this author Absolutely BOREDOM
April 7, 2019
Some of these reviews are real irritating. I know it’s goodreads and I should set the bar low, but come on. The fact that you don’t “get it” and don’t want to work for it says more about you as a reader than it does about the novel itself. Return to your James Patterson. You don’t deserve Kathryn Davis.
November 14, 2022
I was thinking I would start this review with the sentence, “This is the strangest book I’ve ever read,” then thought, wait a minute. Three Novels, by Samuel Beckett. If the whole volume doesn’t qualify (and it does), The Unnameable alone would do the trick. And then I thought, in a weird way, Kathryn Davis is a little like Samuel Beckett.
I don’t like reviews that compare authors, especially ones that say, This novel is like Samuel Beckett with a pinch of Pyncheon and a big dollop of Kurt Vonnegut, crap like that. Authors aren’t fundamentally comparable. But the thing that is similar between Kathryn Davis and Beckett is that the sentences themselves are lyrical, a joy to read, but the joining of them doesn’t make much sense, at least not to the discursive mind. The meaning flows at a deeper, more emotional level, where you sense that you’re being nourished, but you’re not absolutely sure.
The first paragraph is a good example (almost any paragraph is a good example):
“We were in the labyrinth. Afterward, no one could agree on the time. Jee Moon was tucking someone’s right hand in under their blanket, having first tucked in the left. She did this tenderly but firmly, as if to suggest we could be doing it for ourselves. Next she took someone’s head and lifted it like it wasn’t part of a human body, a cabbage or a planet or the repository of all thought thoughts and evil, which, when you think about it, is exactly what a human head is. Everyone could smell the gas the permafrost gave off as it melted; we could feel the labyrinth floor sinking under our mats. Lower, lower, going down, deeper down than Paradise. Department stores used to have elevators and the elevators had operators who told you what you were going to find when you stepped through the slowly opening door. There would be a white torso without a head or arms; there would be people you knew you’d never meet again.”
We start off the paragraph in the labyrinth and end up in a department store (and I do indeed remember those elevators, and those floors with their various items), but actually, the chapter takes place in a yoga class, something I didn’t realize the first time through that paragraph, though you can see it if you read it again. Jee Moon (the only person in this novel who actually has a name) is the teacher. The class is in the final pose of the day, commonly known as shavasana, or corpse pose. And the unique thing that happens (though I’m not sure of this, just as I’m not sure of anything else in this novel) is that, when the class ends, one of the people doesn’t get up. This person was doing corpse pose and actually became a corpse.
Other characters in this novel are identified by their functions in life, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook. The genders are mixed. There is also a woman poet called P, and a moment when the Archivist is trying to get to a reading she is giving, though there’s a terrific rainstorm going on at the college where he works, and he’s having problems. All of these people seem to know P, and have known her since she was a child. The narrative also mentions a father and mother, and the Keeper seems to be basically a family’s nanny. The narrative keeps making reference to earlier times, and to a place where a family lived.
I have of course read the jacket copy to this book, and a review[1] by the marvelous Laura Miller, in Slate (who calls Kathryn Davis “The most original novelist in America. I read [The Silk Road] in a state I can only describe as baffled wonder”). No one else has mentioned the conclusion I began to draw, but it was that all these people (identified by their functions) are members of the same family, that they all went to school together, all had the same mother, all knew P. The one thing I can’t figure out is why they were all in the same yoga class, and this doesn’t seem to be the first time. Jee Moon has been a factor in all of their lives. It’s a family yoga class?
I actually thought when I read the first chapter that this was an extremely idiosyncratic mystery novel, that it would wander around in time and space but we would eventually discover how the corpse became a corpse, including the possibility that one of these people is a murderer. As far as I can tell, that does not happen, unless I missed something, which I very well may have. I actually felt that the book didn’t come to a conclusion. It just ended.
I nevertheless had a marvelous time reading it, though it was like eating cuisine minceur; you finish the meal and say, wow, the tastes were marvelous, like nothing else I’ve ever had, but at the same time you’re thinking, did I just eat something? I may want to read more by Kathryn Davis. But right now I want a cheeseburger.
[1] For other baffled reviews, including several Did Not Finish, look here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...
www.davidguy.org
I don’t like reviews that compare authors, especially ones that say, This novel is like Samuel Beckett with a pinch of Pyncheon and a big dollop of Kurt Vonnegut, crap like that. Authors aren’t fundamentally comparable. But the thing that is similar between Kathryn Davis and Beckett is that the sentences themselves are lyrical, a joy to read, but the joining of them doesn’t make much sense, at least not to the discursive mind. The meaning flows at a deeper, more emotional level, where you sense that you’re being nourished, but you’re not absolutely sure.
The first paragraph is a good example (almost any paragraph is a good example):
“We were in the labyrinth. Afterward, no one could agree on the time. Jee Moon was tucking someone’s right hand in under their blanket, having first tucked in the left. She did this tenderly but firmly, as if to suggest we could be doing it for ourselves. Next she took someone’s head and lifted it like it wasn’t part of a human body, a cabbage or a planet or the repository of all thought thoughts and evil, which, when you think about it, is exactly what a human head is. Everyone could smell the gas the permafrost gave off as it melted; we could feel the labyrinth floor sinking under our mats. Lower, lower, going down, deeper down than Paradise. Department stores used to have elevators and the elevators had operators who told you what you were going to find when you stepped through the slowly opening door. There would be a white torso without a head or arms; there would be people you knew you’d never meet again.”
We start off the paragraph in the labyrinth and end up in a department store (and I do indeed remember those elevators, and those floors with their various items), but actually, the chapter takes place in a yoga class, something I didn’t realize the first time through that paragraph, though you can see it if you read it again. Jee Moon (the only person in this novel who actually has a name) is the teacher. The class is in the final pose of the day, commonly known as shavasana, or corpse pose. And the unique thing that happens (though I’m not sure of this, just as I’m not sure of anything else in this novel) is that, when the class ends, one of the people doesn’t get up. This person was doing corpse pose and actually became a corpse.
Other characters in this novel are identified by their functions in life, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook. The genders are mixed. There is also a woman poet called P, and a moment when the Archivist is trying to get to a reading she is giving, though there’s a terrific rainstorm going on at the college where he works, and he’s having problems. All of these people seem to know P, and have known her since she was a child. The narrative also mentions a father and mother, and the Keeper seems to be basically a family’s nanny. The narrative keeps making reference to earlier times, and to a place where a family lived.
I have of course read the jacket copy to this book, and a review[1] by the marvelous Laura Miller, in Slate (who calls Kathryn Davis “The most original novelist in America. I read [The Silk Road] in a state I can only describe as baffled wonder”). No one else has mentioned the conclusion I began to draw, but it was that all these people (identified by their functions) are members of the same family, that they all went to school together, all had the same mother, all knew P. The one thing I can’t figure out is why they were all in the same yoga class, and this doesn’t seem to be the first time. Jee Moon has been a factor in all of their lives. It’s a family yoga class?
I actually thought when I read the first chapter that this was an extremely idiosyncratic mystery novel, that it would wander around in time and space but we would eventually discover how the corpse became a corpse, including the possibility that one of these people is a murderer. As far as I can tell, that does not happen, unless I missed something, which I very well may have. I actually felt that the book didn’t come to a conclusion. It just ended.
I nevertheless had a marvelous time reading it, though it was like eating cuisine minceur; you finish the meal and say, wow, the tastes were marvelous, like nothing else I’ve ever had, but at the same time you’re thinking, did I just eat something? I may want to read more by Kathryn Davis. But right now I want a cheeseburger.
[1] For other baffled reviews, including several Did Not Finish, look here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...
www.davidguy.org
March 31, 2019
I'm afraid I don't have much to say about this short, occasionally breahtaking book that goes much beyond what everyone says. It's mysterious, and kind of hard to follow, but still funny and warm to the touch-- the circumstances and their consequences feel indistinct, but the characters are real, even if their lack of traditional names (they are all The Cook or The Botanist, etc) made them a little hard to keep straight. But two things are worth mentioning: first, there's this central conceit, of the Silk Road as the source of both civilization and the transmission line for the plagues that end civilization, and this was a striking idea to swan around in for 132 pps. It's something I'm going to try to reflect on after having finished the book, whether it's a truism or something surprising. It surprised me, but then, I'm not always very aware of things:)
The other notable elements is that despite leaving her reader kind of in the dark about some basic things, Davis' sentences are very clear and confident, so you feel like you're in good hands even when you're lost. Maybe its the apocalyptic setting and drift of this book, but I think the writing reminded me of Beckett, too, this somewhat playful if unostentatious handle on words, like they are just root vegetables that you put on the table, chop, and the put in a pot to flavor a broth. My metaphor kind of sucks, but I hope you know what I mean...
Worth your time, but don't ask me what it's all about.
The other notable elements is that despite leaving her reader kind of in the dark about some basic things, Davis' sentences are very clear and confident, so you feel like you're in good hands even when you're lost. Maybe its the apocalyptic setting and drift of this book, but I think the writing reminded me of Beckett, too, this somewhat playful if unostentatious handle on words, like they are just root vegetables that you put on the table, chop, and the put in a pot to flavor a broth. My metaphor kind of sucks, but I hope you know what I mean...
Worth your time, but don't ask me what it's all about.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 82 reviews