PERLMANN’S SILENCE - Pascal Mercier

 –Atlantic Books - $36.99

Reviewed on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon programme  19 December 2011

I have to say straight off that this is a quite difficult read. It is also some 620 pages long, a huge novel by any standards.

The book’s protagonist is Dr.Philipp Perlmann who is an internationally distinguished professor of linguistics at a German university and who has spent a great deal of his life attending learned conferences. Over the years he has been deeply engaged in his special field, he has written eloquently about it to much critical acclaim but recently, and especially with the death of his beloved wife, linguistics means little to him anymore. He is widowed, lonely, unhappy and has lost his sense of purpose.

The problem is that he has accepted an invitation from the Italian company Olivetti to set up a linguistic research group to be followed by a major conference featuring these linguistic academics from around the world and this is about to take place and he is to deliver the major address. They are meeting at a picturesque town near Genoa and he has arrived early to prepare his address. The trouble is his grief and lack of confidence in his own professional standing have made it impossible for him to write his keynote address. He has writers block in spades. So he resorts to plagiarism. He plans to pagiarise the work of a Russian academic, Leskov, who was to have attended the conference but has had to pull out because he can’t get a permit to leave Russia. But when Leskov’s imminent arrival is unexpectedly announced within a few days of Perlmann delivering his paper which will thus expose his plagiarism and destroy his reputation. Perlmann’s mounting desperation leads him to contemplate drastic measures including murder and suicide.

The problem for me is that the story is almost entirely devoted to Perlmann’s worries, his headaches and inability to sleep, his brooding and numerous anxieties, his total lack of ideas for his address, his paranoia........and I got rather weary of him. In fact if I wasn't reviewing this book for Radio NZ and had bought the book myself then I wouldn't have finished it.
It is also pretty heavy going, e.g. here are a couple of paragraphs from pages 98 &176 -

"Leskov now attacked the idea that the narration of remembered scenes was a simple description of images arising, a linguistic inventory of fixed material that dictated the logic of narration though its unambiguously determined contours. That was neither the case with regard to the objective fixed points of a scene nor in the facets of the self-image read into it. The narration of one's own past was always a fresh undertaking in which other forces were at work than the intention to call up recorded material in a detailed manner. There was above all the need to make a meaningful whole out of the remembered scene and one's own presence within it, and accordingly a lack of meaning was interpreted as an imperfection of memory."

"Thinking in sentences - he read - always meant a diminution of possibilities. Not only in the simple sense that the actually thought sentence by both logic and attentiveness rules out other sentences that could have been thought instead.It was more important that linguistic thought took its initial bearings from the repertoire of familiar, tried-and-tested sentences which expressed a familiar picture of things, which seemed in their familiarities to lack alternatives. This impression, that things could be seen differently,was the natural enemy of the imagination as the ability to envisage everything quite differently"


I guess it is a novel written by an academic, the author is a professor of philosophy in Berlin, on an academic subject and featuring a cast made up almost entirely of academics. I guess some readers will enjoy their academic arguments, their jealousies of and rivalries with each other, the complexities of translating abstruse subjects from one language to another, and the observation of a man’s mind slowly unravelling may well be found fascinating but for me I’m afraid it didn’t work.

I want to read fiction to escape, to relax, to pass the time on a long flight, to enjoy the sound of the waves breaking while reading at the beach. I don't want to be reminded of university lectures or have to stop every few minutes to try and figure out what it is  the author is saying.

There is a market for long, complex literary novels but it is a small one and I'm afraid I'm not part of it. I have a super intelligent philosopher friend who is currently doing a PhD in Paris and I'm going to now pass Perlmann's Silence on to him. I reckon he'll love it!

Oh and I should just quickly add in closing that this book was originally published in German back in 1995 and has only now been translated into English. One suspects this is as a result of the huge success of his novel, Night Train to Lisbon, which was published in English in 2008.
Shaun Whiteside translated Perlmann's Silence. What a mammoth task that must have been.