Echo Under Story

by Katherine Silver

"Whenever a professional translator slips into the writer's seat, something compelling emerges. Katherine Silver brings considerable restraint to the job, but enshrouds her spare offering with lush atmospherics of place and feeling. Her homage to Proust's invincibility, in light of our own frail mortality, provides unexpected ballast and resonance. A lot of mental and emotional activity for so small a book."
- Eric Karpeles, author of "Paintings in Proust", translator of "Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp"

"With echoes of Roland Barthes, Katherine Silver writes a diary of mourning in which memory, pain, humor, and a passion for finding the right word are woven together in order to delve, not into the certainty of death, but rather, and more radically, into the mystery of life."
- María Sonia Cristoff, author of "False Calm" and "Include Me Out"

82 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2019

Reviews

[Aaron Shulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had read several Katherine Silver books before ever reading a book by Katherine Silver. An acclaimed translator of authors such as César Aira, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Horacio Castellanos Moya, for decades she has been the medium through which the words of many great authors pass into English. This is what drove my curiosity when I learned that she had a novel entirely her own coming out. What would she be like translating herself?

The result is the slim but deep Echo Under Story, a journal-like account of a woman named K., who has returned to her childhood home following her mother’s death to take charge of the house, on the one hand, and grieve on the other. The fragmented format of short, diaristic entries—many of which include translations of passages from Proust at the bottoms of the pages—is both elastic and roomy. Silver leads the reader into K.’s distant past, her always-shifting musings, her relationship with her mother, and the forest near the house where she spends so much time. If there is any plot to speak of beyond the K’s return and reckoning with her mother’s absence, it’s her mind’s constant, melancholy play along dissolving thresholds: between life and death, the natural world and the self, the need for solitude and companionship, what’s been lost and what’s still to be gained.

Here's an interview I did with Silver about her book:

https://believermag.com/logger/an-int...

[Dick Cluster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely fictionalized memoir/essay/novel-in-vignettes. A daughter revisits her late mother’s house and journals, tries to fix up the house, talk to her mother, see and be one with her natural surroundings. A writer, she writes exquisitely about nature and language and the urge to write. And she and her mother both read Proust, providing a thoughtful but painless introduction if, like me, you’ve never read him before. And, I'm sure, a very personal and thought provoking re-encounter for those who have.

[Alora · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is not for me.