The Size of the World

by Joan Silber

Overview

Love and family loyalty meet up with the allure of far-off vistas in elegant new fiction by an acclaimed novelist.

A richly imagined novel—set in wartime Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Sicily, and contemporary America—about men and women whose jolting encounters with the unfamiliar force them to realize how many "riffs there are to being human." Travelers, colonials, immigrants, and returned ex-pats meet or pass one another in narratives spanning lifetimes.In the book's opening, an engineer in Vietnam is shaken to discover why his company's planes are getting lost. A modern marriage between a Thai Muslim and an American woman leads to a terrible family fight. In 1920s Siam a young woman experiences the colonial stance of her tin-prospecting brother. The last section returns the brother to the States, older now but ever in love with Asian women.Love, loss, yearning, self-delusion, and forgiveness are here in ways fresh and surprising. And in the tradition of E. M. Forster, seeing the size of the world changes the meaning of home-sickness for all the characters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393070705
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/17/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	435 KB

About the Author

Joan Silber is the author of six previous works of fiction. Among many awards and honors, she has won a PEN/Hemingway Award and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

Hometown:

New York, NY

Date of Birth:

June 14, 1945

Place of Birth:

Newark, New Jersey

Education:

B.A., Sarah Lawrence College, 1967; M.A., New York University, 1980

Editorial Reviews

War, love and culture shock take various forms, but the size of the world, in Silber's magnificent fiction, is often no larger than the distance to the person in bed beside you. Like NBA finalist Ideas of Heaven (2005), Silber's sixth work of fiction consists of interlinked stories where minor or passing characters in one piece become the narrators of others, roaming from WWII Sicily to roaring '20s Siam, and from Vietnam-era Mexico to 9/11-era Bloomington, Ind. All six stories turn on the tensions between home, exile and otherness, but to follow any of the threads would be to give away the subtle connections among the characters, from a male Sicilian-American postcolonialist professor from Hoboken to a Florida woman named Kit who can sum up an old boyfriend as "the sort of boy who seemed startled when having sex. At the time his awe and confusion were endearing." The frankness of Silber's characters is deliciously at odds with the delicacy of their observations as they absorb children, affairs, fractured and repaired families and early death in environments familiar and alien to them. The characters' many lifetimes pass with a page-turning effortlessness that belies their intense, moving depths. (June)

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Publishers Weekly

The size of the world turns out to be astonishingly large but also intimately connected, as this novel moves us dexterously across several generations, from Thailand to Vietnam, to Mexico and the United States. Silber (Ideas of Heaven, 2004, etc.) delicately entwines multiple narrative threads. She does so using the Faulkneresque technique of putting some characters on center stage for a time, then moving them to the side to give others the opportunity to tell their stories. There is no central unifying principle or guiding authorial consciousness. Rather, the antiphonal voices offer multiple perspectives. Many of the tensions inherent in the novel involve cross-cultural encounters. Toby, for example, is an engineer sent to Vietnam in the 1960s to figure out why planes on bombing runs are going drastically off course. After weeks of feverish activity with a brilliant colleague, they discover the mundane cause-defective screws in the gimbal of the gyroscopes. (In a deft move late in the novel, Silber introduces us to Owen, the character who sold these screws in the first place and is horrified by this discovery.) Toby marries a Thai nurse, Toon, who winds up on the periphery of another character's narrative. One story is narrated from the perspective of Corinna, Owen's sister, who develops a crush on Zain, a married Muslim. Silber gives one narrative to Kit, Toby's former girlfriend, to whom in loneliness he writes when he's in Vietnam. Annunziata narrates the story of her journey from Sicily to Brooklyn, and we find out that she's the mother of Viana, whose first husband's grandfather is Zain. Silber guides the reader expertly through the narrative maze, elegantly exploring the subtletiesof human interaction. Agent: Geri Thoma/Elaine Markson Agency

Kirkus Reviews

Silber allows readers to see life as intimately knowable yet essentially mysterious.

Howard Norman - Washington Post