A novel which looks at different forms of home and homelessness, married life and parenthood abroad. About how easy it is to lose your own identity without a home.
Literary fiction | English sample translation available
The novel The Other Side of Silence not only looks at the home as a place that keeps us anchored, its various forms and the ways it can be lost (homelessness, migration, exile, moving house, temporary accommodation, expulsion) but also at a wide range of social problems: refugees, politics, religion and history, and our prospects for the future. However, it also encompasses the variety of personal relationships that are governed by the interests of multinational corporations, obtrusive family histories, the gulf between continents and the clash between “small and great history”. Memories of places and the experience of them release a flood of nostalgia for an earlier life and people, for the closeness that recedes when we leave a familiar place. The town of L., which bears a striking resemblance to Lyon, where the author lives, is described from several perspectives: that of a nouveau-riche entrepreneur as well as a homeless Czech woman called Anděla.
The framework of the book is provided by the Notes of a Free Young Man, in which a man from L., who is supported by his wife and takes care of the family, decides to write a novel, which takes up about three-quarters of the book. The story he is writing is called The Other Side of Silence. The complex web of thematic threads and the ingenious metatextual game are held together by the detached view of the narrator (the young man).
Magdaléna Platzová (1972) is a writer and playwright. She grew up in Prague, went to school in the United States and England, and earned a master’s degree in Philosophy from Charles University in Prague. She worked as an actress and translator and later as an editor and journalist. From 2009 to 2012, she lived in New York, where she taught a course on Franz Kafka at New York University. She currently lives in Lyon with her husband and three children.