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Original Essays | October 14, 2009
By Emily Pilloton
About six months ago, at a fundraising event for the nonprofit I founded, Project H, a six-year-old girl handed me a pickle jar full of pennies....
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Dying Inside
by Robert Silverberg
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Synopses & Reviews In 1972, Robert Silverberg, even then an acknowledged leader in the science fiction field, published a book that was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. More than three decades later, Dying Inside has stood the test of time and has been recognized as one of the finest novels the field has ever produced. Never wasting a word, Silverberg persuasively shows us what it would be like to read minds, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man shaped by that unique power; a power he is now inexorably losing. Acclaimed upon first publication by SF critics and mainstream reviewers alike, Dying Inside is overdue for reintroduction to todays SF audience. This is a novel for everyone who appreciates deeply affecting characterization, imaginative power, and the irreplaceable perspective unique to speculative fiction of the highest order. Review: David Selig is in his early 40s, with his youthful promise long behind him. A lonely child and a smart aleck in elementary school, he grew up feeling isolated from the rest of the world, happiest with his books. Even at the age of 10, he seemed so maladjusted that his hardworking parents sacrificed to send him to a psychiatrist, to no good purpose. He and his adopted sister have cordially hated each ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) other their whole lives. At Columbia in the mid-1950s, Selig did reasonably well in his literature classes, and after graduation he went to work briefly in a stock brokerage firm. Over the years he fell seriously in love twice, and both affairs ended disastrously. Most recently, he has been eking out a living by ghost-writing term papers for the Columbia students of the 1970s. He lives by his wits, just above the poverty line, and he is going bald. He is also losing his ability to read people's minds — and with it his entire past life, his very sense of self. In the course of "Dying Inside," Selig meets one other person who can read minds, with whom he forms an uneasy friendship. Neither can transmit thoughts, only receive them. But whereas Tom Nyquist uses his power to make easy money on Wall Street, perceive the secret desires of any woman he fancies and generally enjoy a sybaritic lifestyle, Selig is utterly miserable. He has hidden his extraordinary talent from almost everyone. More often than not, to use it makes him feel a scummy, perverted voyeur. Paradoxically, his easy awareness of people's inner lives has left him isolated and alone. "Without it I might have been a happy nobody instead of a dismal one." Only when he probes deeply into a person, down past the surface personality into the unconscious, does Selig find that his power brings him an experience of nirvana-like, oceanic oneness. Yet now his special gift has grown temperamental, as variable as the weather. But what can he do? "Powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies." Now widely regarded as Robert Silverberg's masterpiece, "Dying Inside," first published in 1972, has just been reissued in a handsome trade paperback with a new preface by its author, one of science fiction's most distinguished writers. Yet this book is hardly what most people think of as science fiction. As a character, Selig has more in common with Philip Roth's Portnoy than with the more typical superwarriors of, say, Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers." Instead, Silverberg's novel offers an eerily evocative picture of New York life in the late 1950s and '60s: a time of bisexual professors, swinging singles, Black Power, psychedelic drugs and all-round social and political upheaval. Given Selig's bookishness, the novel is also suffused with buried quotations from T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare and many other literary eminences. Above all, though, "Dying Inside" is a pleasure to read, full of that dry humor so common to melancholic intellectuals. Selig's taste in music, we learn, runs to "pretty austere stuff, thorny, inaccessible: Schoenberg, late Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, the Bartok quartets, Bach passacaglias. Nothing that you'd be likely to whistle after one hearing." At one time he contemplates writing a novel about — what else? — alienation in modern life. Most of the time David Selig addresses the reader in a self-pitying first-person voice, though some sections seamlessly switch to third-person narration. Silverberg is a master of multiple verbal registers, catching perfectly the tone of a term paper on Kafka, the period jive talk of a black basketball player, the flirtatious chatter of cocktail parties, the back-and-forth snapping of a brother and sister, the Yiddish idioms of Selig's parents, the earnest fogyness of a Columbia dean, even the stream of consciousness itself. Some characters, like Selig's promiscuous sister, Judith, and a racist basketball player, are especially vivid creations. Or take the hip French professor Claude Guermantes: "He is about 40, just under six feet tall, muscular, athletic; he wears his elegant sandy hair done in swirling baroque waves, and his short goatee is impeccably clipped. His clothing is so advanced in style that I lack the vocabulary to describe it, being unaware of fashion myself: a kind of mantle of coarse green and gold fabric (linen? muslin?), a scarlet sash, flaring satin trousers, turned-up pointed-toed medieval boots. His dandyish appearance and mannered posture suggest that he might be gay, but he gives off a powerful aura of heterosexuality. ... His voice is soft, purring." Selig ultimately judges Guermantes to be monstrous, and yet many of the man's characteristics — the carefully tended goatee, the dandyism, the voice — are clearly borrowed from Silverberg himself. It's insane that "Dying Inside" should be subtly dismissed as merely a genre classic. This is a superb novel about a common human sorrow, that great shock of middle age — the recognition that we are all dying inside and that all of us must face the eventual disappearance of the person we have been. More and more, as time goes by, our bodies break down, our minds start to lose their quickness, and, suddenly, inconceivably, our best work is behind us. Early science fiction was frequently hopeful, celebrating eye-popping technology or the acquisition of special mental powers. But by the late 1950s and early '60s such naivete was a thing of the past. Philip K. Dick described a future where everything was rusty or broken, and Daniel Keyes left us in tears at the end of "Flowers for Algernon." Since then, flawed or wounded superheroes have become the norm: From Batman to the Watchmen, they are usually all too human, or even less than human. As his power leaves him, Selig writes: "I make lists now of the things I once could do that I can no longer. Inventories of the shrinkage. Like a dying man confined to his bed, paralyzed but observant, watching his relatives pilfer his goods. This day the television set has gone, and this day the Thackeray first editions ... and tomorrow it will be the pots and pans, the Venetian blinds, my neckties." In the end, as Shakespeare said long ago, we are left "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who can be reached at mdirda(at symbol)gmail.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: “One of those rare novels that manages to be at once dazzling and tender.”Michael Chabon on Dying Inside“Dying Inside is an artists summit that doubles as an intimate allegory of the artists quandary.”Jonathan Lethem “Silverberg has written the perfect science fiction novel for people who dont like science fiction.”The New York Times Book Review on Dying Inside “Probably one of the best science fiction novels of all time.”Locus on Dying Inside “Intensely human…intensely true. Readers are likely to remember Dying Inside a generation and more from now!”Analog Synopsis: A science fiction classic returns to print, with a new introduction by the author. About the Author A SFWA Grand Master and the winner of five Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards, ROBERT SILVERBERG, author of the bestselling Majipoor series and dozens of other books, is one of the giants of science fiction and fantasy. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, writer Karen Haber.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780765322302
- Author:
- Silverberg, Robert
- Publisher:
- Orb Books
- Subject:
- Science Fiction - General
- Subject:
- Science / General
- Subject:
- Science fiction
- Edition Description:
- Second Edition
- Publication Date:
- March 2009
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 302
- Dimensions:
- 826x554x82 73
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