The Silk Road, Kathryn Davis
The Silk Road, Kathryn Davis
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The Silk Road
A Novel

Author: Kathryn Davis

Narrator: Laura Jennings

Unabridged: 4 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/25/2019


Synopsis

A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literatureThe Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there―paths on which they still seem to be traveling.The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’ sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit.Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls―a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.

About Kathryn Davis

Kathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist. She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, both the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006. She is senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis.

About Laura Jennings

Having graduated with a Master's of Fine Arts in creative writing, Laura Jennings has an intrinsic appreciation of the mechanisms and techniques which comprise the art of the tale. She's able to analyze the underlying moods and currents of a book and bring these into her interpretation of the author's work. She believes her place as narrator is to be the facilitator for all the nuances of the spoken word and the written word between the author and the listener. Her naturally clear and fresh voice as narrator contributes that extra dimension of enjoyment. Laura enjoys a quiet lifestyle in the Pacific Northwest with her loving husband and aged beagle, Dottie. Her days are filled with narrating, yoga, hiking and, of course, reading.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Meike on December 16, 2018

In her experimental novel, Davis creates a highly associative narrative, full of characters and events charged with ambiguous meanings - there seems to be no limit to the possibilities a reader has to connect the dots. When eight siblings, enigmatically called the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Bota......more

Goodreads review by Gerhard on February 04, 2020

Review to follow. Once my brain returns to my body. Is it possible to be so discombobulated by a book that you deeply, deeply do not understand, only catch glimpses of its (non) meaning in the fiery heat of its literary annihilation, and yet ecstatically enjoy and savour every single word, sentence,......more

Goodreads review by Bill on March 30, 2019

As with my other Kathryn Davis experiences, it's often hard to tell what's going on. But who cares when one can get lost in sentences like:The Topologist could feel the Botanist scrutinizing her for a sign of whatever it was that had turned her from a stern-faced girl with dark brows and thin brown......more

Goodreads review by John on January 08, 2020

A lyrical engagement with time, mortality, imagination, and archetypes, Kathryn Davis's The Silk Road is strange, haunting, and smart, its gorgeous, lyrical, evocative prose reminiscent of Rikki Ducornet, John Hawkes, and Virginia Woolf's writing.......more

Goodreads review by cardulelia on December 07, 2018

What in the actual. hell. did I just read? Alright so I've done something with this book that I would never normally do: reread it immediately upon finishing. I had to because I've never been so uncertain about plot in something that is this clearly written. The Silk Road is a very strange beast. Eac......more


Quotes

The Silk Road concerns itself with nothing less than the workings of the great wheel of time and its terrifying promises of rebirth and forgetfulness.” Joy Williams, author of The Visiting Privilege

“A book so vertiginously strange and yet so lullingly beautiful, it falls upon the reader like the change of day to night. Like all of Kathryn Davis’s books, The Silk Road induces a fugue state in the reader from which she emerges with reluctance.” Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble

“A haunting take on the fluidity and circuitousness of human life…Davis is a singular writer, capable of piercing observations and gorgeous language.” Publishers Weekly

“Davis has created a spooky, slippery, provocative, and elegiac fable in which amusingly fractious and poignantly imperiled pilgrims press on in a blasted world, destination unknown.” Booklist