The Size of the World

by Joan Silber

“A sublime and humane jigsaw puzzle of a novel.” —Boston Globe

An intricate web of crossed paths and enlightening journeys teach each of Joan Silber’s characters something about “the size of the world” in this richly imagined novel. A National Book Award finalist for her last book, Silber here addresses the timeless topics of love, loss, yearning, and forgiveness. She “does brilliant justice to the many ways we have of being human” (Seattle Times) and “offers a dizzying array of insights as she cuts back and forth between stories set in the U.S. and Asia” (Chicago Tribune).

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Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Asia, Travel, Historical Fiction, Book Club, Literature

348 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2008

About the author

Joan Silber is the author of nine books of fiction. Her book Improvement was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was listed as one of the year's best books by The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The Seattle Times, and Kirkus Reviews. She lives in New York and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Keep up with Joan at joansilber.net.

Reviews

[Mary Lins · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Size of the World”, is the second Joan Silber book I’ve read, and like “Improvement”, it is a loosely connected collection of character studies. The “action” takes place all over the world, and the characters are fascinating and drawn in such a way that I believe is Silber’s gift of making them real and flawed, but gently. They are recognizably human to the core, and we can see our own human successes and failures through them.

The fun thing about reading a Silber book such as these, is to try to figure out the connections among the characters. In “The Size of the World” they are linked obviously by all having lived for a time in a foreign land, but other more puzzling connections are revealed eventually and it’s a delight to witness how skillfully Silber connects the dots.

On to another Joan Silber novel soon!

[pb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cool book, well written. The book is really 6 separate stories, some taking place at different times and in different parts of the world, and yet are all connected. It's really a unique puzzle. I liked discovering the connections in each story. I found myself having to flip back some times just to remember how a character was referred to in an earlier story. I don't want to give away too much because part of the fun was figuring out how the person in the story was connected to one of the previous stories. The stories travel to Vietnam, Mexico, Florida, Thailand, Sicily, Arizona and New York. It also goes back and forth in time. Starting in the 60's, going back to the 20's, then up to recent times, then back again. It sounds confusing, and yet it all makes perfect sense and has a nice flow. In the end, with a nice touch, the beginning and the end is brought together with a screw.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked how the author took stories that seemed completely unrelated at first glance and linked them to one another. The fact that the last story led up to the beginning of the first story made the whole novel seem more complete. Her style of writing is very simplistic, but it seems to work in this case. She sets up the stories so that they lead you down a certain stream of thought without her having to write it all out. Despite the distance between different countries and varying cultures, the world is connected in ways that are hard to grasp without personal experience. This is one of the main reasons I enjoy traveling so much. I love to travel to places that seem exotic or far flung. Each place is always distinctive in its own way, yet there is thread of commonality that runs through them all that I can only explain as humanity.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the format - each chapter is an individual story about how someone feels they fit into the world, and how small/large their world is. Each story also relates in some way to the other stories - characters, locations, sort of like "7 degrees of separation".

[Stefanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

First page-turner I've read in a long time...highly recommend!

[Maya Lang · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. I wavered between 4 and 5 stars because this isn't my favorite of Silber's books. The format of linked stories is a bit challenging, but why should that be counted against her? These stories do not fit together easily. I think Silber is less interested in telling a novel through stories (à la Olive Kitteridge) and more interested in notes on a theme, the way poems fit together in a chapbook. What we get is a meditation on provincialism—specifically, American provincialism, with nuanced reflections on class and money and gender and ethnicity, war, necessity, love. I was less fond of the "spot the connection" links, when one character makes a cameo in another's story, because although Silber is too deft for this to feel contrived, I still felt it was a kind of game. Craig Seligman wrote beautifully in his NYT review of the screws in these stories, how they work and echo and resonate. If you read this book, read his review just for that. I was left with the image of one screw holding these stories together, as though Silber had somehow managed to connect her pieces with elegant hardware, each story giving the screw a turn. I wouldn't recommend this as the place to start if you haven't read Joan Silber, but I remain in awe of her talent as a writer.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Silber in what I think of as her world-historical style, as in Ideas of Heaven, which I now am going to need to reread, here. This spans the American century, from 1920s Florida through the War on Terror, with individual stories glancing off of and echoing one another in enticing ways. Major throughlines: colonialism; Americans abroad; abandonment and marriage; how children live out, and don't, their parents' foibles and failings; Thailand and Buddhism v Islam v capitalism v Christianity; whether we ever really leave the places where we had our best days. My favorite thing about her work is that you never really know what a story is going to be about until it's over--the one that starts out about the Vietnam War ends up being a cross-cultural romance and then about childrearing, and then the closing story gets at plot points from the first story from an entirely new angle and trajectory. And of course the endlessly brilliant, and seemingly tossed-off, descriptions of the grind of continuing to be a person. I should probably read more Alice Munro, too, shouldn't I?

[John Wenk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This really does read as a variations on a theme collection of short stories that are most subtly interconnected. In each story is pretty much a marriage plot that usually opens up the parochial worlds of its all similarly understanding, smart, self-aware protagonists to the possibilities and richness of a foreign world. It's an engaging theme that as a traveler I appreciate. She captures well the contradictions, curiosity and emotional adventure of the journeying as it opens up closed off spaces in the souls of the characters. Despite the similarities in style, characterization and theme, like all good variations, it does not get stale. This is especially remarkable as that similar style is one that I usually dislike - summary story telling that avoids dialogue or detail. Not a great book, but one I expect to reflect back on when living again in Colombia and returning to South East Asia.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe this was an "amazing" book. I just feel as though I am so enthusiastic about the books I'm reading that I don't know how to compare or "rank" them with Goodread's rating system.

So here's what I loved about Silber's book: first of all, I really like linked stories, and that is what this book is composed of: characters and era's intersect, although at first I wasn't certain how, or even if, this was going to happen. Silber demands an attention most novelists don't. We have to listen to what the book's title is calling us to notice. What IS the size of the world? How do we measure it? How do we engage with that question? Is it a physical size? A cultural size? An emotional size? I was stunned by how ambitious this novel is...and by how well she succeeded in making me question my own small world, in spite of how much I've tried to engage it.

[Karlan · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading the author's most recent award winning book, IMPROVEMENT, I looked for an earlier one. The structure is similar with chapters narrated by various characters, but the plot is completely different. The opening chapter describes the life of a young engineer sent to Vietnam to try to figure out what is going wrong to cause US planes to crash. Fascinating Thai and American characters, their children, their Sicilian grandparents all enter the story. The final chapter links the events at the beginning together. It was a clever and insightful novel.

[B · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unusual format with six stories, seemingly unrelated, as they take place in different parts of the world and at different times, but actually are related, as you find out. The writing is so sublime, that no matter whose story I was following, from individuals I adored to the one man I didn't, I couldn't stop reading and became entirely absorbed in their lives and surroundings. And in the process, picked up some historical and cultural knowledge of Thailand, a place I have known little of.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too much to say to get into this at the moment. She creates a rich, vivid, believable world. No small achievement, even more impressive since it's unburdened by "literary'' pretension and claims that properly lie outside the scope of fiction. Making my way through her excellent work; so far this is my favorite.

[MaryAnn · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are many new novels about immigrants coming to the USA, and the cultural differences. This one is similar, but different. It features several individuals and families, intertwined throughout the book, who encounter culture shock either by going to another country to live, or by coming to the USA to live. An interesting way to present multiple stories and generations.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I generally don't like short stories, the writing was engaging enough to keep me looking forward to the next story. The individual stories were not related in a big way which was a bit disappointing.

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

compelling slightly connected series of short stories, almost novellas, about people's experiences in new countries. Some of the characters are a little thin.

[Courtney Leblanc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful stories about beautiful people in diverse, struggling, yet sometimes prosperous places. We all travel, we are all immigrants.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars. Surprisingly good read of this book I found in a little free library

[Brenda · Rating 2 out of 5]

It started out so well and….then I didn’t like it so I quit reading.

[Cheryl Gould · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better to read it without a lot of time in between so you catch all the people connections. I like her view of the world and relationships. Somehow feel like she captures life well.

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a writer. This novel gave me great company on a flight, two ferries, and an airport delay.

[Katie]

Was interested in the first story and totally lost the thread and any interest in finishing it

[Leigh Haber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book at a fantastic bookstore in Berkeley, Mrs. Dalloway's. I was in the Bay Area on business, but staying with a friend. She lives on a very peaceful street in Berkeley, a good place for reading. I had brought with me to California the new Lorrie Moore novel, A Gate at the Stairs, which I had been waiting for for a long time. I love Lorrie Moore's short stories, and I couldn't wait to start the novel. What a bummer it is, thusfar! It's really clunky, with a storyline that feels very forced and artificial. It's told from the pov of an undergraduate at a college in the Midwest, who forms a close friendship with a local woman who is in the process of adopting a child. I found myself disapproving of every other phrase and sentence choice, which was not the transporting reading experience I had been looking for.

Mrs. Dalloway's has extremely thoughtful, idiosyncratic staff recommendations, I found, and one of the most enthusiastic was one for a novel by Joan Silber entitled The Size of the World. I'd never read this writer before, but the description of it was alluring, especially because, I read, it was set in Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Sicily and Florida-- a pretty unlikely quintet.

The novel is really an interlinked set of short novellas or longish short stories, and the connection among them all is tenuous, but the voice just keeps growing on you. Each of the stories is quite different from the other in setting (though Thailand is a common thread), period, and character, and yet there is a brooding, haunting stillness that is a throughline, as well as a contemplation of death and disappointment that seems always to creep in. I love to travel, and Silber's descriptive powers are masterful when it comes to the evocation of place. I ended up reading the entire book in about three sittings. I have found a new fiction writer to love, though I remain disappointed about the new Lorrie Moore!!

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very beautifully wriiten. The stories take place in Sicily, Thailand, Mexico and the United States, over the course of the 20th century. I learned a lot about other countries, and other times in history. The book, by the way, is not really a novel. It's a series of connected stories. I found myself stopping to reread passages many times. For example, this one: "In March we had the Feast of San Giuseppe, my first brother’s name day, and when I watched the bonfires at night, I talked to Piddu in my head about how smoky it was. We didn’t have bread to bake into the shapes of angels and flowers, but all the women in our part of town had made an altar with a bower of myrtle branches hung with lemons and oranges. Look how nice, I said to Piddu. No one knows what to do with the dead and I didn’t know either. I kept wanting to give Piddu something, and maybe the shadow of the dead produces in us a shadow kindness. I was a little in love with the beauty of this, but I saw already how it would stay inside my head, all that unused kindness, curling in on itself." The narrator is a young girl in Silicy during WW II. Her brother, Piddu, was killed in the war. When I finished this book, I almost wanted to start over from the beginning. The writing moves slowly, which I love. I was compeeled to keep reading, but not to read as fast as I could!

[Nelson · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mild twist on the novel in stories genre. Here, all of the stories are tangentially connected through peripheral characters, distant relations, historical events, places. If there is a theme, it seems to be that the world is not that big, that plucking a plot thread in San Diego causes a string to vibrate in Vietnam. Well, okay. The writing is serviceable, not particularly evocative or poetic--so the interest needed to carry one through seems to be picking up on and remembering how a character in one story is the grandson or ex-lover or whatever of a main character in another story. But once one picks up on these links, there doesn't seem to be much more to do or appreciate. At least one of the stories seemed a little stronger than the others ("Paradise") and might have been more interesting as a fully developed novel. The book as a whole feels like a not wholly successful attempt to clear out some longer stories and research from the back drawer and tie them all together loosely as a novel grouped around a fairly obvious theme. The writing just doesn't carry the sentence-by-sentence firepower or poetry (allegedly present in Silber's far-better regarded Ideas of Heaven--indeed, only picked this up on the strength of the earlier book's reputation) to mask the thinness of connection and conception of the entire enterprise.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in Vietnam (Toby), Thailand (Toon-Toby's wife), Mexico (Kit-Toby's ex-girlfriend), Siam (later Thailand-Owen and Zain), America (Mike who is married to Vianna whose friend in Thailand was Toon), Sicily (Annunziata who married and moved to America, dtr is Vianna who married a Muslim and moved to Thailand), Corinna, sister of Owen, whose father lost everything in a Florida real estate crash in the 1920s, went to Thailand and suffered an unrequited love for Zain, married a Brit and moved back to American during WWII. and, finally, Owen again who worked for the company that manufactured screws that caused faulty navigation in military planes used in Vietnam. Toby was sent to Vietnam by the company that purchased the screws to figure out why the planes failed causing pilots and crew to be lost. It sounds like a soap opera as the stories intertwine and cross over one another from the 1920s to the 1960s. Each character is a separate chapter. I kept reading to see how the character and his/her relationship to others developed.

[Kori · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as Ideas of Heaven. Joan Silber is an exquisite writer and I enjoyed this book a great deal because of the language alone. The first story in particular knocked me out. The problem, for me, lies with the question of how we define novels vs. novels in stories. These stories are nicely tied together, but the link is not as close as Ideas of Heaven, which is billed as "A Ring of Stories." So what do we do? Is it a novel and seen as a complete story, or a series of longer stories? It reminded me a lot of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, which is thematically linked, though the last three stories directly tie together. Perhaps this is me imposing my own aesthetic again, but I feel like the movement throughout time periods was a distraction - it works in Ideas of Heaven because the stories are shorter, but something about 70-80 page stories in this format made it harder to keep the pieces together. Love her writing.

[Kasey Jueds · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know I'm always comparing books to others by the same author... which might not be a great policy... but I can't seem to help it. So: more of the same. Because I loved Ideas of Heaven so deeply; in fact it's one of my all-time favorite fiction books. I did love The Size of the World, and though it seems kind of mean to compare it to a book that seems practically perfect to me (which IOH really does), I did compare, and TSOTW fell a bit short. Which is to say, reading it wasn't the same transcendent experience that reading IOH was, at least for me. But still, this book is smart and lovely. One of the blurbs on the back says Silber is wonderful at writing about passionate love and spiritual seeking, and points out how unusual it is to find those concerns in the same book... which seems very true to me. I so appreciate that about her work, along with her language, her honesty, her large view of the world.

[Susy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank goodness for book groups that include readers who know writers! Joan Silber is a new find as an author; she's also a professor at Sarah Lawrence College & teaches with the sister-in-law of my good friend. So that's how we met in a vicarious sort of way. But the book is the real gift; it's described as linked short stories with the common thread being place -Siam pre Thailand and after Thailand and a connection to the narrator of the first pice, an engineer sent to Vietnam early in the conflict to figure out why the US planes are crashing. Clearly not a great assignment. And Toby begins the journey to determine the size of the world.

Silber's talent is her excellent research about the place settings of each novella as well as an ability to capture the minute details that give unique life to each of her characters. Together these elements create a vivid sense of place with character.

This is a wonderful book and I look forward to reading more of her work.

[Carole · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book because of its themes of people (Americans) getting outside their comfort zones and experiencing life in other cultures. The book is comprised of six mini-novels, each with a different protagonist, which are only loosly connected by the last page. I felt that I had missed some of the connections, necessitating my re-reading parts of earlier chapters.

I've been in the mood lately for some solid, happy endings to life, but this novel left most the stories unresolved. It described one woman's life as "a hard one, but not a bad one" because of choices she had made.

Favorite quote: "If you live long enough, everything happens to you."