The Other Side of Silence

"The Other Side of Silence" is one of the bleakest novels you'll ever read. It is essentially the story of one woman's unending suffering and misery. With each new stop in her life comes a new abuse. An orphan, she shuffles from one person to the next and almost always encounters someone who wants to exploit her. Everything is taken away from this woman, Hanna, including, at one point, her last name. When she finally, briefly finds love, that too is cruelly stripped from her. I'll admit, despite some obvious flaws, I found Hanna's story engrossing and compelling. I really felt for this woman and became involved in her tragic life. My complaint, though, is that Brink's characters are too black and white -- either "evil" or "good." Catholics take a particular beating here (they are either rapists, sadists or hypocrites) and men do, too. It seems in this world that you are either malevolent or an angel. There are also too many cliche scenarios (mixed in with the more original and unique turns in the story they feel quite clunky). All of this refers to the first half of the book. Part two of the novel takes an entirely different direction. Hanna, with a young orphan (Hanna all over again) and a ragtag army, sets out on some lofty revenge. I found this section of the book highly misguided and almost ruinous. It severely damages the book. Brink seems unsure himself about Hanna's rampage. He questions exactly why they're doing it and if it's a good decision, and he starts to write the officers they kill as nothing more than foolish kids, which makes Hanna seem just as cruel as the people we're supposed to be happy to see die. The whole thing feels absurd anyway. One attack by Hanna's army on a fort is laughable. As the men of the army ambush officers in the desert, the women start to knock off men one by one at the fort, right out of "Ten Little Indians," and as men keep getting killed after going off with the women and the women keep firing shots into the air toward the desert as signs, you have to wonder exactly how long it will take the German officers to figure out that this party that has just arrived -- and brought with it sickness and death -- is not friendly. The whole episode is like a bad sitcom. The first part of the book centers on Hanna's time in an orphanage and her stay in Frauenstein, a massive edifice in the African desert. I found her history -- violent and depressing as it was -- fascinating; Hanna becomes very real to you. You do want her to take the young orphan, Katja, and get away from Frauenstein, and briefly the book keeps pace by introducing a rather scary missionary when they leave, but as soon as this army forms and Hanna incessantly tries to justify what she's doing, the book falls flat on its face. And the ending is utterly contradictory and wholly unsatisfying. I give the book four stars because for me it is really two books: Hanna's history, and the tepid revenge conclusion that has no real need

Mr Brink tells the haunting story of Hanna X which takes place at the beginning of the 20th century in the German colony of what was then called Deutsch-Südwestafrika (German South-West Africa), now Namibia. It was then the custom that the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft sent hundreds of women and girls to Africa "to assuage the need of men desperate for matrimony, procreation or an uncomplicated" love-making. Hanna X, resident of a forlorn place called Frauenstein in the middle of nowhere in the desert, contemplates her face in the mirror. Tufts of blond hair hacked off with a kitchen knife, part of her right ear is missing leaving a dark hole, she has only part of the left eyebrow left, her face is criss-crossed with scars and most frightening of all, she has no tongue, only a small black stub, far back. The sound she utters is Ahhhhh... How did Hanna X undergo such hideous mutilations and who inflicted them to her? And so the narrator traces back the harrowing tale of this poor orphan back to her childhood in Bremen. She grew up in an institution called the Little Children of Jesus where her books were confiscated by Frau Agathe, where she was "touched" by Pastor Ulrich and beaten regularly. Hanna found refuge with her teacher, Fräulein Braunschweig, who let her read stories like "Die Leiden des Jungen Werther" or that of Jeanne D'Arc. Her years in service were also marked by desolation. With the Klatts for instance. Frau Hildegard was a mean-spirited woman and Herr Dieter had to be "serviced" for a few Pfennig. So Hanna decided to apply with the Kolonialgesellschaft and was granted passage to Africa by Frau Sprandel who dismissed her with the premonitory warning not to "expect too much of her palm trees". It is on board the Hans Woermann that Hanna experienced love and tenderness for the first and only time in her life with a girl called Lotte. It was after their arrival in Africa, during the train journey which was to take them to Windhoek, that Hanna was confronted with Hauptmann Heinrich Böhlke and the outcome of this encounter was what Hanna now sees in the mirror in Frauenstein: a monstrously disfigured creature... Such humiliation and dismemberment was inflicted to her not because of anything she had done but simply because she was a woman. From then on, it is hatred that drives everything she does "as inexorable as the desert sun". This hatred is a form of liberation for Hanna as she begins her long journey with Katja towards the confrontation with the man or men who turned her into something "like out of hell". As the two women set off in the desert towards Windhoek, it is to keep an appointment with destiny... "The Other Side of Silence" is probably the best novel ever written about the horrors of colonialism in Africa. Some passages in the book remind the reader of what happened during the Holocaust. Mr Brink has rightly been compared to the greatest writers of our times like Solzhenitsyn, Garcia Marques or Peter Carey.

As a student of South Africa, I found The Other Side of Silence a fascinating addition to my understanding of the country's early colonization. The language is spare, important when mutilation is central to the storyline. I read it twice, the second revealed nuances missed during the first. On my recommendation, my book club will read this ...

And she says it in a big way. This novel takes place in the early years of the 20th Century, among the German-occupied colonies of South-West Africa. From her earliest years as an orphan, Hanna X, the main character in Brink's novel, suffers incredible amounts of abuse. First off, there is the unreasonable strictness of Frau Agathe to deal with. Beatings are a regular thing at the orphanage "because it is a Christian place where evil will not be tolerated." Then there is the lecherous priest, Pastor Ulrich, who violates her physically and spiritually. Then, a series of transitional periods where the young Hanna is shipped from one place to another, and these experiences always result in trauma, disappointment, disillusionment. Her life becomes characterized by alienation, loneliness, pain, loss, and denigration.Throughout all of this, Hanna hangs on to a fleeting childhood memory, something she refers to as "The Time Before"... in which she remembers meeting an Irish girl named Susan at the beach of the Weser in Bremen. Susan gave Hanna a shell, and told her to listen to its inner sounds. Hanna keeps this shell, and for her it comes to represent the "silence which she carries deep within her, from the lost time before she ever arrived at the orphanage..."When Hanna hears that hundreds of women are regularly being shipped from Hamburg to the remote African colonies to serve as wives for the men stationed there... she signs up. What could be worse than what she is presently experiencing?She arrives at Swakopmund, and ends up at an extremely remote secular nunnery known as Frauenstein.Here (and on the way here) she will learn that there are places worse than the orphanage. Much worse.What follows is a very dark story. Do not be mistaken, this is a story difficult to read for its brutal depictions of torture and violence, but written in a style and with an imagery that is evocative, unmistakingly vivid, even beautiful. However, this is in no way a beautiful story where all is resolved at the end. Where justice has its day, where all is made right. One ought to be prepared for this fact.It shows the most absolutely horrid aspects of human nature, and always face-up, in the full light of the hot sun. Not only are the perpetrators of crimes against Hanna (the heroine) shown in all of their shameless ghastliness, but she herself becomes nearly as brutal in the latter half of the book. There comes a time when Hanna says "No more" and understandably, we want her to succeed in her plans for vengeance against the greatest of crimes that have been commited against her. She assembles a ragtag band of vigilantes, those who have suffered injustices of their own, and together they set out on a quest to reclaim dignity, with Hanna as their (mute) leader.This is a difficult book, but only because of its subject matter. The way it is written makes me want to read more by this wonderful author.