Biting Silence

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"Every two weeks, my wife says: I hope you're not writing another word against this regime. She says: Remember what happened to you. What we went through. I think, on account of one sentence: The true . . .' etc. I look at her, keep quiet, write and do not publish anything. I wait. Alone. In the shadows with my typewriter, a folding table, a stack of paper and a bottle, I write: To freedom, even if it lasts only fifteen minutes.'"- from Biting Silence

The journalist narrator of Biting Silence named no names and claimed no untruths in his brief editorials about high-level government corruption. He was not a radical, not a communist, less interested in politics than in writing itself. Nevertheless, his words proved the beginning of a harrowing journey from his home to a life in which prison, torture, and eventual exile became more than just words on a page.

This, the first novel from exiled Bolivian writer Arturo von Vacano, draws heavily on the author's own experience as a journalist hampered by dictatorship and forced to choose between silence and safety. It is a wrenching, provocative portrait of the collision between free expression and uneasy power. In a remarkable real-life twist, the same government that von Vacano criticizes ordered all copies of the book's Spanish-language edition burned, and, until recently, it was unavailable in its author's homeland.

Biting Silence is a searingly emotional protest against censorship and a celebration of the freedom that writing provides-a welcome discovery not only for fans of von Vacano's Latin American contemporaries, but for anyone concerned with the basic freedom to write.

Arturo von Vacano was born in 1938 in La Paz, Bolivia. He worked as a journalist in Bolivia and Peru before fleeing the country in 1980 to live in exile in the United States. He currently lives outside Washington, D.C. and works as a writer and editor for United Press International.