A Louisiana native, Smith is currently employed on an oil platform off the west coast of Africa, while the diamonds are somewhere in the immense, war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. But Smith’s grown tired of the platform and he hates the idea of wasting a full house. One last adventure, he tells himself, and then, diamonds or no diamonds, he’s heading home to Louisiana.
In Kinshasa, Smith meets a young woman named Béatrice, who hails from a village on the other side of the country. But this village, she tells Smith, is where his diamonds are―a thousand miles away as the crow flies, but significantly longer on the patchwork of guerilla-patrolled roads that traverse the country. If he helps her get home, she’ll show him where the stones are.
What ensues is a guided tour of hell in which a not-so-innocent American abroad comes face to face with the legacy of European imperialism in the heart of the African continent. Like Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and V.S. Naipaul before him, Jacobs reveals the limits of the western gaze, inverting the tropes of the white-savior novel to give us a story about a man who realizes you don’t have to travel to another country to get lost, and you don’t have to go home to be found.
In Kinshasa, Smith meets a young woman named Béatrice, who hails from a village on the other side of the country. But this village, she tells Smith, is where his diamonds are―a thousand miles away as the crow flies, but significantly longer on the patchwork of guerilla-patrolled roads that traverse the country. If he helps her get home, she’ll show him where the stones are.
What ensues is a guided tour of hell in which a not-so-innocent American abroad comes face to face with the legacy of European imperialism in the heart of the African continent. Like Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and V.S. Naipaul before him, Jacobs reveals the limits of the western gaze, inverting the tropes of the white-savior novel to give us a story about a man who realizes you don’t have to travel to another country to get lost, and you don’t have to go home to be found.
Upcoming Readings
September 17, 2024
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October 20, 2024
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October 30, 2024
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In praise of Silent Light.
In the timeless rainforests of Silent Light, the past is never past. This paradox of the Congo is the conflicting wind that steers this seductive book. Mark Jacobs sculpts his twinned heroes with a steady eye and chiseled prose—his writing dazzles in sustained bursts, evincing an airy humor in lockstep with grounded insight. His careening tale about a quest for mythic diamonds and lost families will transport you into the volcanic lungs of the earth, where the infernal past still bleeds into the turbulent present, smearing everything with European lava and American ash. In Mark Jacobs’ fire-juggling hands, you’ll come back bearing memories from Congolese lives. Haunting, subtly imagined . . . a feat of bravura storytelling from a dauntless writer at the peak of his powers.”
— A. Igoni Barrett, author of Blackass
I have admired the elegance and bravery of Mark Jacobs's writing for many years. He has created a masterful canon of work in short stories and novels. In Silent Light he imagines even more deeply and writes even more superbly. Jacobs is surgical in capturing the heartbeat, the terror and the often derailed promise of the American Dream. Here the American Dream of one man collides with the forces that create a seemingly permanent African nightmare. This is a sophisticated, taut character study and a revelation about the geography and geopolitics of war and greed and the enduring possibility of redemption. Smart but never cynical, humane and utterly human, this is an ode to the wretched of the earth and the angels that walk among them. Welcome a great American writer.”
— Marita Golden, author of The Wide Circumference of Love
Every now and then a novel comes along that not only reinvigorates your faith in what a novel can accomplish but reimagines for you how a novel can be made, the fluency of its movements and the potency of its meanings. Mark Jacobs's Silent Light steadfastly resists the blurbist's cliches (inspiring, fascinating, brilliant, and other easy lies) and instead demands to be dubbed precisely what it is: Art. Here is a novel of consequence, an intrepid foray into dark hearts seeking light, its storytelling sensibility so assured, so dignified, it makes you marvel. It also makes you grateful Mark Jacobs is here to remind us all how it's done."
— William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark
With Silent Light, Mark Jacobs, one of America’s great short story writers, establishes himself as a novelistic scion of Joseph Conrad, in that he ventures into many hearts of darkness, into the jungles of Africa, yes, but also in those that reside within the human heart. The novel is harrowing, humorous, youthful, and, in the end, wise.”
— Richard Wiley, author of Soldiers in Hiding