The Silk Road
A Novel
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A spellbinding novel about transience and mortality, by one of the most original voices in American literature
The 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’s 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Davis's provocative and offbeat eighth novel (after Duplex) is a haunting take on the fluidity and circuitousness of human life, fragmented through the stories of a group of eight siblings the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook. The novel opens deep inside the labyrinth of an isolated settlement, following a yoga class led by Jee Moon, the mysterious woman who has uncanny and uncomfortable ties to the siblings. After they perform the corpse pose and one of the siblings doesn't arise, readers are led into the slipstream of the siblings' collective lifetime. The narrative braids scenes from their turbulent childhood spent with their capricious mother, stoic father, and odd Nanny with moments from their individual and collective memories, from the senseless violence of a prison break to the various lovers of their lives. Even as the siblings disagree over which details belong to whose memories, they prove that the combined sum of the whole is greater than the parts as they craft their family and, by extension, human history as they live it. Davis is a singular writer, capable of piercing observations and gorgeous language.
