Review: My Letter
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 25, 2013
Michael, you entitled your silo story "The Letter" and that already won me over even before I started reading, because in itself it already pointed at multiple meanings, as it IS a letter, but it is also a written message, hence an assemblage of said letters. Because you're a man of letters, and your respect for letters, and the words formed from them, is what I admire the most in your work.Your letter vibrates with Life, even if it's a tragic, parting message (your own parting message with the World of the Silo, maybe); its form, with its long, neverending sentences, long sentences with many commas and "ands", sentences the likes of which I remember reading in Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude, as if the writer wanted to put in as many words, as many thoughts, as many memories as possible - as many letters - before it is too late, before the opportunity to write, and to live, is taken away from him.What a fitting analogy with yourself as an author.Your letter gives the Silo world, the Wooliverse, a brilliant homage; one might think it's short, it's a one-shot, what possible reach will it have? Actually, it somehow manages to embrace the whole of Hugh Howey's creation, as well as the recent fanfiction it has spawned, in terms of emotion and truthfulness.Truthfulness?Yes. Reading your letter, one comes to the realization that now The Silo has become part of our culture, so many readers have loved and shared and wished to expand Hugh Howey's world that in a way it has become REAL. And this letter, because it is the expression of one man's feelings, about his life, about his love, about his fears and his thoughts, well, this letter comes as a crowning touch, a cherry on the cake, a testimony that The Wooliverse truly MEANS something.Your letter is filled with the words of the character you created, you write the words that the character writes, your story is the story of a man telling his story. I like this mise en abyme, and it doesn't end there, since your character remembers words from the people he knew and loved, he writes about the stories these people told him.In other words (!), each and every one of us are stories, made of other people's stories, people who came before us, who live with us, who work with us... Everything is connected and that's why this deceitfully short work actually carries a lot of weight. Because after all, you too are an author writing within the words of another author.It is your way of telling the world that you too were there, you too liked Hugh's Wool, and its universe, and the other writers who played with it.It is your way of telling the world that the Silo is a microcosm, a symbol that reflects Life as it already is.It is your way of telling the world that whatever the context, no matter how hard it can be, one needs to keep fighting for his ideas and ideals and the right to remain a free man.Your letter is an open letter of love and life and humanism.And this one is my way of telling you I thought it was a darn good letter.