I tell people who show interest in Marty's new film to read the novel first. “Read it to the end—and by the ‘end' I mean the appendix.”
I find many responses to the novel shallow, and some critical reviews miss the heart of the story. People assume Silence is about the silence of God. Yet Endo, almost every time he spoke about his novel, kept saying: “Silence is not a novel about the silence of God; it's a novel about the voice of God speaking through silence and trauma.”
It took Marty several years to get to this heart of the novel. In recent interviews, he confessed he couldn't “get it” at first, but he also knew this was a journey Endo was inviting him to, a journey he knew he had to take.
Read Full Article »