And just as Magnus, as a child scared of the dark, comforts himself by whispering fragments of stories into his teddy bear’s ear, ‘preferably the left ear, the one that has been injured and therefore needs special care’, so this novelist’s attention is caught by the plight of history’s victims, of those who suffer man’s inhumanity to man, and those who unwittingly perhaps do violence to themselves in seeking revenge for wrongs they have suffered — those who because of their injuries need special care.
In this novel, as in her previous works, Sylvie Germain celebrates as a palliative the power of story-telling, the forging of a text out of potentially inexhaustible material, access to which requires of the writer the excavational skills of an archaeologist and a kind of mystical self-effacement and receptiveness to the paradox of bringing expression out of silence, light out of darkness, and allowing dream to enter reality.
‘To write is to descend into the prompter’s box and learn to listen to the breathing of language in its silences, between words, around words, sometimes at the heart of words.’
(Magnus)
And of all words names are perhaps the most significant: it is of course no accident that Magnus’s adoptive family name is Dunkeltal, evoking the shadow of the valley of death, and the name Magnus itself, the author herself has pointed out, is in its sonority suggestive of elusiveness, of something that cannot be pinned down.
‘There is not one word that does not carry in its recesses eddies of light and volleys of echoes, and which does not quiver at the urgent plying of other words.’
(The Book of Nights)
While Sylvie Germain’s writing is steeped in the Catholic liturgy and biblical texts it is also informed by her reading of an extraordinary wide range of other writers from many different literatures — including Czech, Icelandic and Latin American, as well as English, French and German — whose work she often quotes directly in her own books. Her exploration of the themes of forgiveness, and of redemption and salvation through love — the overriding concern of all her books — reflects a profoundly spiritual sensibility, but there is nothing formal or static or immutable about her apprehension of the numinous. It rejoices in the fugitive, the precarious, the protean, in mystery and mutability. It is generous and accepting and inclusive.
Who is Magnus? Like all of us, an individual, seeking an identity for himself, a reconciliation with his existence, and hoping to find happiness.