When I read the first few pages of Days in the History of Silence I thought I will be captivated by the story. But then it trickled to a rather tedious pace, although its prose is beautifully written.😦

The story revolves around Eva and Simon, an elderly Norwegian married couple with three grown daughters. Both Eva and Simon have events in their past they keep hidden from their children and others. We learn Eva had a son out of wedlock, who she gave up for adoption when he was six months old. And Simon, we learn, is a survivor of the Holocaust.

For most part of the novel, Simon is silent. He is somewhat older than Eva, so he could be suffering from dementia, or it could be that survivor’s guilt drove him to silence, after his efforts to find family members who went missing turned out to be futile.

"He never told them about it, although he planned and practiced all these evenings, nights, days, when he went over the painful aspects of the past with me. Instead he became more and more silent."

Throughout the novel I felt more empathetic towards Simon than Eva. I thought had Eva been more supportive, Simon would have been able to tell their children of his loss. Perhaps Eva was not fond of the idea of telling their children of his past because she did not want to share her’s with them, but I can not help it but think Simon’s unrevealed past became a constant burden to him, eating him up inside. ( )

The scope of this story is small but the emotional effect is somehow huge. A woman struggles to care for her husband, whose dementia takes the form of him falling toward silence; in a lifetime of loving-but-flawed decisions they have made together, they have neglected to say what was most important, and now it's too late. I felt in such good hands as a reader--Lindstrøm is a master storyteller who takes this small story and turns it into something larger. ( )

Abandoned two-thirds of the way through because it was destroying me. It's hard for a book to do that, but the voice paired with the subject matter led to ill effects.

Eva och Simon är pensionerade. De har tre döttrar. Simon slutar prata och visar tecken på demens. De har haft en lettisk kvinna som städhjälp och hon blev väldigt god vän med paret. Det tar tid att förstå varför kvinnan fick sluta. Sakta, sakta vävs historien om Eva och Simon ihop. De bär båda på två stora hemligheter som de inte delat med sina barn. Det finns scener i boken som är förfärliga att läsa. Det finns ett motstånd att fortsätta. Jag har svårt att ta till mig Eva och Simons levnadsöde. Välskriven bok men så tung och dyster. ( )

Lindstrom is a wonderful writer; her prose is conversational and draws the reader into the tale. The voicing doesn't change, and therein lies a major problem. We are introduced to a conventional husband and wife, somewhere in Norway. However, the more we learn, the more normalcy fades. The husband, as a child, endured a unique punishment during the war and his immediate family escaped slaughter. But what a price they had to pay. The wife has her own demons and is equally damaged. Effective communication throughout is an aspiration rather than a reality. We are dealing with two emotional cripples in a co-dependency. Their three children seem to have escaped, but they are not fully realized characters. So many questions emerge about the paralysis that imprison this man and woman--and not a lot of answers are provided. Lindstrom, it seems, had an idea and carried it through to the last page. But it is as if the author were wearing blinders and did not want to consider any narrative developments that would take away from her basic premise, which would appear to be that each human is an isolate unable to bridge the gap with others--especially with the frustratingly imprecise process we call language. It should be noted that this work was accorded many prizes and awards in Norway. ( )