THE SILENCE

The final volume of Norwegian writer Bjørneboe’s bleak History of Bestiality trilogy (first published in 1973, and preceded by Moment of Freedom and Powderhouse) is a discursive, accusatory lamentation (marginally reminiscent of Camus’s The Fall) for “man the incomprehensible—endlessly evil, endlessly good—all-renewing, all-destroying.” The nameless narrator, a loner living somewhere in North Africa, expresses his disgust for such exemplary crimes against humanity as colonialist Europe’s appropriation of the Americas in both literal conversations with his black revolutionary acquaintance Ali (perhaps a fictionalized Eldridge Cleaver) and imaginary ones with such eminences as Christopher Columbus, Robespierre, and the deity. Beneath his misanthropy lurks a hopeful vision of some possible future transformation of humanity’s thirst for conquest and material gain. Read as the conclusion to Bjørneboe’s trilogy, The Silence assumes a concentrated, crushing power. Readers who don’t know the earlier volumes, however, are likely to dismiss it as overheated, redundant ranting.