The History of Silence

Resumen del libro

A work that reflects on the beauty and the risk of silence, on small unmentionable secrets and betrayals that lurk behind every love.

"I had just come back from the supermarket and I emptied the shopping bags out on the kitchen table. Irene was already boiling water for the pasta in a pan. Then I gave her a heartbroken look before announcing that I had forgotten the spaghetti. From that moment on, in our private language I've forgotten the spaghetti came to mean giving up on something out of a sense of overwhelming fatigue. And so, when Irene once managed to go four days without smoking, she said I've forgotten the spaghetti and lit a cigarette. And I said it while lying in bed, the moment I woke up, the day I decided to abandon my stubborn efforts to go the gym every morning . . . Since that fateful day we regretted a hundred times over having forgotten the spaghetti, which leads me to believe that we spend our lives giving up on things, primarily those we are able to get only by our own efforts."

The History of Silence-winner of the prestigious Premio Herralde de Novela on its original publication in Spanish-is a novel with a splendid gallery of characters in which the author displays his implacable sense of humor and shows us to what extent life is a comedy under the constant threat of a tragic ending.

Biografía del autor

Pedro Zarraluki (Barcelona, 1954) ha publicado, entre otras novelas, El responsable de las ranas (1990), Premio Ciudad de Barcelona y Premio Ojo Crítico de RNE; La historia del silencio (1994), Premio Herralde de Novela; Un encargo difícil (2005), Premio Nadal; y Todo eso que tanto nos gusta (2008), todas ellas traducidas a diversos idiomas. También es autor de los libros de cuentos Galería de enormidades (1989), Retrato de familia con catástrofe (1989), Humor pródigo (2007) y Te espero dentro (Destino, 2014). La curva del olvido (Destino, 2021) supone su vuelta al género de la novela.