After all, what would a world in which having books be a crime be like?
With a poetic narrative and a climate that evokes a typical episode of the Black Mirror series, the author transports us to an alternative future in which not only this nonsense happens, but many other absurdities, such as the fact that a person has their life changed if it is the presence of the C-gene, the crime gene, was found in its DNA.
"It was one of those periods of history so tragically adult that the absurd is only visible to the eyes of childhood"
The book is divided into three parts: the first and last told from the point of view of little Alice, a child who longs to be known, and the second through the eyes of Hilário Pena, a university student who believes he is the victim of a conspiracy that it puts your freedom at stake. Although their stories are separated by a temporal and geographic distance (Hilário is Brazilian, Alice Portuguese), they have two things in common.
Both are abandoned by their families: while Hilário is a young orphan trying to find his place in the world through friendships with influential people, Alice is treated as a real nuisance by her parents and sister. The other thing that unites such different characters is the love for books. Although this passion takes place at different stages of their lives, it serves as an engine to drive this incredible plot that makes us reflect on the importance of books in our lives.
“As in not a few occasions in History, some initially harmless ideas, taken to the extreme, have brought about serious changes in Humanity. The world out there is very different today.”
The author also addresses other issues between the lines: the society in which Alice lives is based on a system known as GATE (acronym for Gene, Alea, Tele and Ego), where genes are decisive for the future, in which people have their decisions based on applications that randomly choose answers, and that obsession with the ego makes everything have to bend to the individual's will. It is the latter that causes the ban on paper books, since, as they have an immutable content, they cannot have their stories altered at the reader's pleasure.
“Can you understand the magic of this? What can I extract from a story that is universal, and how that story speaks to my senses, to my anguish, to my desires; anyway, how do you communicate with my life?”
And I just mentioned some of the issues covered in this book, because there's much, much more! But I won't say too much so as not to spoil your surprise. Even if small in number of pages, “The Silence of Books” has hundreds of historical and literary references, and is a beautiful ode to the love for these magical instruments that transport us to different eras and places and, at the same time, make us travel inside ourselves, bringing surface our true selves.
“Words are never 'just words'. There are several levels of reading, and what is most important will always be in the deep layers. This, by the way, is the paradox of knowledge: one has to go to the deepest layers to rise to the apex; you have to go underground to reach the top of the mountain.”
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