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- The Long
Silence of Mario Salviati - |
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- What
the critics say
- More on the book
- Sleeve information
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Second Afrikaans Edition, Tafelberg,
Cape Town
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Russian Edition of The Long Silence of Mario Salviati, Mockba
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French edition of The Long Silence of Mario Salviati, Phebus,
Paris
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USA
Edition, Regan Books (HarperCollins), New York
If
you need additional information regarding The Long Silence of
Mario Salviati, please do not hesitate to contact HarperCollins at feedback2@harpercollins.com
Order now from Salviati’s page on Amazon.com
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British and Commonwealth
Edition, Sceptre Books (Hodder &
Stoughton),
London
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Dutch
Edition, Meulenhoff, Amsterdam |
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Afrikaans
Edition, Tafelberg, Cape Town |
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German
Edition, Bertelsmann, München
“Etienne van Heerden ist der große Chronist seiner Heimat Südafrika.”
—
André
P. Brink |
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Greek Edition, Livanis, Athens
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What the critics say ...
“...spellbinding...”
The Northern Echo, UK
*
“Hauntingly
rendered...” The Good Book Guide, UK
“Perfect
portrait of the makings of a rainbow nation...breathtaking...from the
first page to the last...” Lincolnshire Echo, UK
*
“Van
Heerden brings the people, the spirits and even the terrain of Yearsonend
to gorgeous life ... a rich novel ... (which) manages to encapsulate the
tumultuous history of South Africa ... The sprawling story, eccentric
ghosts and plucky heroine make The Long Silence of Mario Salviati as
compelling as any page-turner, but Van Heerden’s rich prose and nuanced
explorations of race, greed, passion and the history of South Africa
elevate the novel into the realm of lasting literature.” The San
Franciso Chronicle, San Francisco, USA
*
“Spanning
wars, lives, and continents, this novel unites readers through its beauty
as well as the moments of pain and glory in which the characters find
themselves, in every chapter and on every page.” The Daily
Iowan, Iowa City, USA
*
“A
compelling story. The sort of book a reader can get lost in ... It is a
novel washed in history and lingers afterward like a memory of a place one
might have visited.” Mike Nicol, author of The Ibis Tapestry.
*
“A candidate for the
Great South African novel ... Van Heerden controls his craft like no other.”
De Volkskrant, Amsterdam, Netherlands
*
“Van Heerden’s
words blast the reader’s mind through a clear, blue African sky.”
The
Telegraph, London, UK
*
“Dazzling
storytelling magically weaves the fantastical with the everyday and lends
a compelling power to the author’s meditations on history, art and
life.” The Guardian, London, UK
*
“With
his latest novel, translated from Afrikaans, van Heerden has lived up to
his reputation as the South African Marquez. ... This is a
wondrous tale, weaving magic realism and history, in which van Heerden
captures the stark beauty of the Karoo and its people.”
The
Times, London, UK
*
“If ever a book captured the static charge of a sunbaked landscape, it’s
Etienne van Heerden’s magical fifth novel set in a fictional town in
the South African Karoo desert ... The tales (Ingi) hears are
romantic, tragic, funny and bloody, preserved like fossils in sandstone:
richly packed but often distorted.” Daily
Telegraph, London, UK
*
“Professor
van Heerden weaves many a spell in this engrossing tale.” Choice
magazine, UK
“A
new literary star is emerging.” OK!
magazine, UK
*
“The
novel is a complex tale, full of richly drawn characters from the last
150 years of South African history ... You are drawn in to the secrets
of Yearsonend and its people as Ingi loses her outsider’s
perspective and learns to see events through the villagers’
eyes. It’s a fascinating transformation.” The Big Issue
in the North, USA
*
“It
is, indeed, a magical book.” PopMatters, USA
*
“There
is every chance the reader will fall in love with everything about this
book and its characters ...” Lincolnshire
Echo, USA
* “Rich
in insight and hope ... an impressively colorful picture of a fascinating
and contradictory country ... As writers like Marquez gave a rich artistic
depth to South America - and Alasdair Gray defined the imaginative
landscape of Scotland in Lanark so Van Heerden has created
an ‘artistic map’ of South Africa ...” Scotsman, UK * “Fantastical
and outrageous ... Exuberant and imaginative ...” Independent, UK
*
“It's
easy to see why Van Heerden is being described as an Afrikaans Marquez ...
an exceptionally gifted writer.” Scotland on Sunday, UK * “Rich
and absorbing ...” Sunday Herald, UK * “Immaculately
constructed, well-told and evocatively rendered ...” Sunday
Times, South Africa * “This
sinewy novel ambitiously covers a great swathe of history — the Boer War
up until the election of the first post-apartheid government in South
Africa and everything in between — and it sets out, too, to map the
human heart. Van Heerden succeeds by presenting a glittering array of
characters with often symbolic names whose pasts and presents intertwine,
often with disturbing results ...” The New Zealand Herald, NZ |
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More
on the book
(Info supplied by Regan Books, New York)
A
novel of unbridled imagination and enchantment, The
Long Silence of Mario Salviati
(Regan Books; Publication Date: February 3, 2003; Price: $24.95) is
award-winning South African writer Etienne van Heerden's sweeping tale of
a century of secrets, violence, and greed among the closely-tied denizens
of a barren Afrikaans outpost. As
Garcia Marquez did for Latin America in One
Hundred Years of Solitude, van Heerden has transformed his country’s
tainted - and very real - legacy of colonialism, avarice and racism into a
multi-generational parable of magical
possibilities and ultimate redemption.
Just outside
the little town of Yearsonend, in the South African Karoo, an
extraordinary sculpture of a fish-man appears one morning as if sprouted
from the ground. It is
discovered by Jonty Jack, a local sculptor of great talent, who has turned
his back on public life. Despite
the obvious explanation, Jonty insists that this dolphin-like figure,
dubbed “The Staggering Merman,” is not his work.
Ingi Friedländer, a young curator bent on acquiring the strange
piece of art for the National Gallery, arrives from Cape Town, but Jonty
covers the sculpture and turns a deaf ear to her inquiries.
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At
the Antwerp Book Fair, with Dutch translator, Robert Dorsman (far
left), South African minister of Arts and Culture, Wally Serote,
Afrikaans author Riana Scheepers, Dutch author Henk van Woerden and
South African poet, Sandile Dikeni.
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With the mandate to eventually bring the sculpture back with her,
Ingi settles into the town until she can persuade Jonty to sell it to her.
She quickly finds that Yearsonend is a place with a long, tangled,
and mysterious history. As Ingi
struggles to uncover the secrets of the village she begins an amazing
journey of self-discovery and examines questions about the link between
art and freedom.
Ingi finds
lodgings in the old Drostdy, a peculiar household made up of a bitter old
general, a compliant matron, and a deaf, dumb, and blind old Italian man -
Mario Salviati. She wonders
who Salviati is, and learns that during the Second World War, Italian
prisoners of war were brought to Yearsonend as laborers.
Salviati was a skilled artisan, a stone mason who was put to work
by Big Karl Bergh, Jonty's father, on a project to bring water to the
town. Big Karl disappeared,
but Salviati stayed on, marrying Edit Bergh, a local opera singer.
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Being
interviewed at the Antwerp Book Fair, Belgium, by Dutch writer Ed
van Eeden, 1996. |
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As Ingi starts
to piece together the convoluted connections between the eccentric members
of the town, the narrative shifts in time to the central events of the
past. During the Boer War,
the patriarchs of the town hid a wagon full of gold somewhere nearby.
For a century that gold has been on the minds of the locals, many
of whom suspect others of harboring secret knowledge of its location.
Ingi becomes obsessed with the legacy of the gold, and as she tries
to gather the clues to its whereabouts, she discovers a long-standing feud
between the two reigning families. She
also begins to suspect that Mario Salviati, forever silent, has his own
secrets that might provide the final piece to the puzzle.
While the
story becomes a journey of self discovery for Ingi Friedländer, it
spreads out to encompass every member of the town - the white, black, and
mixed race people whose connections
are buried under time and shame. In
the end, Yearsonend’s secret is not merely about gold, but about the
social and political complications that came to define South Africa in the
twentieth century.
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Sleeve
information (US Edition)
“This
is what’s always kept us
together,” said Jonty quietly. “It’s the dream and the possibility
that give meaning to Yearsonend ... For years now it hasn’t been about
gold ... it’s been about much more than that ... Take Mario Salviati,
for instance: once the gold is found, the general will let him go. We’d
be able to leave the past where it belongs ...”
Secrets abound in the South African Karoo – a
remote landscape of mountains and desert, where legends weaves its way
into daily life. A fabulous merman sculpture miraculously appears one
morning in the yard of eccentric artist Jonty Jack, and Ingi Friedlander,
a young art curator for the National Gallery at Cape Town, comes to
Yearsonend to buy the masterpiece. When Jonty refuses her offer, Ingi
resolves to stay and win him over.
Intrigued by hints of the town’s unusual
history, Ingi persistently questions its inhabitants, who reveal that a
mythical trove of gold is buried nearby. For several centuries gold fever
has gripped the town and sent ripples of suspicion through those who live
there. Tracing the roots of Yearsonend’s violent and magical history of
feuding families, troubled love, and corrosive greed, the narrative
shuttles between the past and present, linking two patriarchs with shadowy
pasts, an earthy angel, a woman without a face, a ragtag band of soldiers,
and a host of other colorful characters. As Ingi delves deeper into the
mysteries of Yearsonend, she is inexplicably drawn to Mario Salviati, a
deaf, dumb, and blind Italian stonecutter who holds the key to many of the
town’s secrets.
A spectacular climax sheds light on many
unanswered questions, and Ingi and the Yearsonenders learn that they are
searching not only for their past, but also for the promise of the future.
With extraordinary imagination and lyricism, Etienne van Heerden captures
the essence of a land steeped in myth, and of a culturally diverse people,
for whom storytelling and history are inextricably linked.
In the rich magic-realism of One
Hundred Years of Solitude, The Long
Silence of Mario Salviati is an
unforgettable journey towards understanding and inspiration.
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“Landscape is
a character in my novels.” A lonely farmhouse in the Little Karoo.
Photograph: Obie
Oberholzer |
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