Q: Why did you decide to write a story about the Holocaust in Norway in your novel, A Town with No Noise (Palimpsest Press, 2025)?
A: My novel began as a book about the hidden lives of wealthy retired people living in a fictional small town in Ontario that had transitioned from agricultural to a winery- and tourist-based economy. When one character with a past in wartime Germany emerged, threads opened up that I turned into storylines about the responsibility to remember and be accountable for atrocities in World War 2.
My narrator is a young woman, Sam, whose ancestry is Norwegian, and after her working visit to the small town ends (she is there to write an article on tourism in the area), her focus shifts to another small town, this one in Occupied Norway. Sam learns about her extended family’s experience there under Nazi occupation—of which she knew nothing until now—and decides to write about it and post what she finds on her blog. Not many people know about what happened in Norway during and after World War 2: that there was a Jewish population there that was all but decimated; that children of German soldiers and Norwegian mothers were treated horribly; and that there was a level of complicity with which the country is still coming to terms. Sam’s character evolves as her knowledge of this history and her family’s role in it grows.
There are two Parts to the book, linked by the first-person narrator Sam; the related themes about privilege, power, history, and remembering and writing about the past also tie the two Parts together. In Part 1, I also introduced both a third-person narrator—who provides vignettes about the residents of the small town that Sam visits—as well as an omniscient narrative voice that speaks via footnotes. These techniques not only provide the reader with windows on the town and on the people that Sam doesn’t have access to, but also emphasize her unreliability as a narrator and the fact that individual perspectives (and what we think we know is true) are limited. In Part 2, Sam herself—an aspiring researcher and historian—uses footnotes in her writings to expand upon the historical research she is conducting about her family and about the Holocaust and the Norwegian Jewish population.
One of the key themes of the novel is that there is no single truth about the historical past, that it takes listening to many voices to piece together a version of truth that is, unavoidably, a mere representation of the past. So using footnotes and also interviews and other narrative forms within the novel allowed me to enact the theme, formally. This is the power of fiction, I believe—to provide multiple perspectives and stories that merge the personal and social threads with the historical, thereby using the imagination to garner empathy and a broader understanding of the human experience.
A Town with No Noise by Karen Smythe (Palimpsest Press, 2025)
About A Town with No Noise:
Samara and J., a struggling young couple, are off to J.’s birthplace, Upton Bay, a small town turned upscale theatre and winery destination. Sam has been hired by an editor friend to write a promotional piece about the place while she and J. stay with his grandfather Otto, a prominent businessman in his day.
But their visit does not go as planned. Sam’s explorations of Upton’s tourist attractions lead her to ugly truths behind the quaint little town’s façade—discoveries that are counterpointed with vignettes of the town’s wealthy, elderly ruling class, painting a different picture than the one Sam’s friend expects her to provide. Tensions between Sam and J. worsen as J.’s true nature emerges and Sam begins to question both his values and his family’s past—especially after Otto tells them stories about his time as a German soldier during WW2.
Back in the city, Sam’s opinions and judgments about what is right and wrong are tested when a shocking truth surfaces about her grandmother’s flight from Norway after the war, profoundly changing Sam’s understanding of who she is and who she wants to become.
In A Town with No Noise, fact and fiction combine to ask difficult questions about the communities we build, questions that are as relevant today as ever: Who stays? Who is chased away? And who decides?
ABOUT KAREN SMYTHE:
Karen Smythe is the author of the novel This Side of Sad (Goose Lane Editions, 2017), the story collection Stubborn Bones (Polestar/Raincoast, 2001), and the ground-breaking critical study Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (McGill-Queen’s U.P., 1992). In the 90s, she was the guest fiction editor for The Wascana Review and fiction editor for the Pottersfield Portfolio, and she also guest edited the Michael Ondaatje issue of Essays on Canadian Writing. Several of Karen’s short stories have appeared in Canadian literary journals including The Fiddlehead, Grain, and The Antigonish Review. A Town with No Noise is her second novel. She currently lives in Guelph, Ontario