The Other Side Of Silence

The Los Angeles Times

This bloody fable, rooted in bloody reality, is one of Brink's most powerful works. — Michael Harris

The New Yorker

The fifteenth novel by a prize-winning South African author takes as its point of departure a German program at the turn of the twentieth century whereby women were shipped out to Germany's colonies in South-West Africa (now Namibia) to be wives -- or, failing that, sexual fodder -- for the colonizers. Brink's protagonist, Hanna X., an abused orphan from Bremen, is eager for the imagined romance of the desert, but life in the colonies turns out to be even worse than what she has known before. After she is raped and disfigured by a German officer, Hanna turns to murder, assembling a "sad menagerie" of other downtrodden people in a crusade of vigilante vengeance. Brink's powerful and brutal story is an effective response to those who suspected that the end of apartheid would leave him without a subject, and a shrewd meditation on the dehumanizing power of hatred.

The New York Times

… at its best, The Other Side of Silence is a novel of unforgettable power. At one point Hanna is cared for by tribal women, who nurse her body with herbal medicines and calm her spirit with their legends, assuring her that ''there is no pain and no badness that a story cannot cure.'' In the context of the novel, this statement can only seem ironic: Hanna's story certainly cannot cure its own pain and badness. Brink's purpose, however, is not to cure the evils of colonialism -- no novelist could do that -- but to probe to the deepest part of their core. — Ruth Franklin

Publishers Weekly

Acclaimed South African novelist Brink (The Rights of Desire; Devil's Valley; etc.) paints a harrowing picture of German South-West Africa (modern-day Namibia) in his latest novel, focusing on a German initiative to import hundreds of women to Africa for the colonists at the turn of the last century. Hanna X is an orphan who spends her early years in Germany trying to catch on as a domestic with a number of families, only to have the sexual advances of various libidinous husbands ruin her efforts to find a stable situation. Hanna thinks she has escaped the world of male domination when she receives permission to emigrate to South Africa, but her escape backfires. Raped and mutilated by brutal German officer Hauptmann Buhlke, she is taken to a horrific outpost known as the Frauenstein, where the abuse continues. The book's surreal, fragmentary first half, in which the events of Hanna's childhood are interspersed with the harrowing details of her arrival in Africa, is followed by a riveting second half, in which Hanna escapes the Frauenstein and tracks down Buhlke with the help of another abused woman, Katja, and a Herero tribesman, Kahapa, whom the two women rescue from a savage German farmer. The trio quickly become a small vigilante posse as they journey to Windhoek to find Buhlke, and their efforts to turn the tables on the Germans succeed when they murder a small troop of soldiers and then wipe out a larger group at a garrison. The relentless violence occasionally turns Hanna into a one-dimensional character, but the imagery from this haunting novel will stay with readers, as will the frightening allure of all-consuming hatred: "So beautiful. So singular. So utterly pure. So abundantly full of life." (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

The New York Times Book Review

"A novel of unforgettable power."

The New Yorker

"A shrewd meditation on the dehumanizing power of hatred."

The Baltimore Sun

"[A] brilliant tale in which sharp glints of hope manage to illumine a near-unbearably inhumane world."

Los Angeles Times Book Review

"This bloody fable, rooted in bloody reality, is one of Brink's most powerful works."

Library Journal

Set in Germany and German South West Africa at the turn of the 20th century, this is the story of Hanna X, an orphan who immigrates to Africa as part of a group of women intended as brides for the male colonists. Her life in a German orphanage has been one of victimization, first at the hands of a priest and later by the husbands in families who employ her as a domestic servant. In Africa, she rejects the crude farmer she has been paired with only to be violently assaulted and disfigured by a German officer, her tongue cut out among other mutilations. Left for dead, she is saved by local tribesmen, who take her to Frauenstein, a desert outpost for unwanted women. After murdering an officer who has raped her young companion, she recruits a small army of the victimized-women and natives-to take revenge on their oppressors. Brutal in its action while poetic in its language, this is an unflinching portrayal of the savagery just beneath civilization's skin. Recommended for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/03.]-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A didactic, overearnest allegory about the evils of colonialism and male chauvinism-in a story set in Germany and the former German colony of South West Africa, now Namibia. As always, Brink is best at describing the landscape, in this case of the austerely beautiful but unforgiving great Namib Desert and the Bushmen, African tribes, and German settlers who live there. He's less successful, though-thanks to no allowance for shading-in addressing the ideas and themes that implacably drive the story. Hanna X, a mutilated German woman raised in an orphanage, makes a decision that changes her life. Living in a desert refuge for women that's also a brothel, she describes the events that led her to flee the refuge and embark, like her heroine Joan of Arc, on a brutal crusade. Moving back and forth between her years in Germany and the events in Africa, she relates how her childhood in Germany was a period of sexual abuse by the orphanage pastor as well as by many of her employers. Once in Africa, she fared even worse. Longing to see the world, she joined with women-in the early 1900s-who were sent by the German government to be the wives of the bachelor German settlers. On the train journey from the port to the colonial capital, however, Hanna is not only raped but terribly mutilated by one of the soldiers accompanying them: her tongue is removed, her ears and genitalia cut off. Later, when Hanna sees young Katya, an orphan at the refuge, being assaulted by a visiting German officer, she kills him, hides his body, and, with Katya, heads into the desert. As the two women journey to the capital to find the man who mutilated her, Hanna encourages those African tribes also bent on avenging thecolonialists to join them. They defeat a German fort, though in another action, only Katya and Hanna will survive. Intellectually and morally pretentious.