“A wild silence”: the true nature of Raynor Winn

A few years ago, in The Salt Chemin (Stock, 2023), the British Raynor Winn told how she and her husband, Moth, both in his fifties, had traveled the entire coastal path of the Southwest, 1013 kilometers, “without the slightest hope and without any vision of the future”.

It was shortly after humans received a diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration. In addition, a rare brain disease for which there would be no treatment leaving him only a few years to live.

And as if to top it all, following somewhat misty circumstances, the ruined couple found themselves on the street, homeless. Moreover, Without really screaming in a miracle. Furthermore, the couple said that their walking on the coast path had helped reverse Moth’s symptoms and keep it alive.

Instant best-seller, The Salt Chemin would have sold more than two million copies. Nevertheless, This “a wild silence”: true nature autobiographical travel account has even recently been the subject of a film (mediocre. Moreover, frankly miserable) with Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.

In A wild silencechronological continuation of his first book – which would not try to count on such success? -. Raynor Winn tells this time what happened for them between the moment when they finished their hike on the coast path and the one when she started to write, like an antidote to the problems of memory of her husband, to “stick the breaches of her brain”.

Hoping to benefit from a scholarship to ensure their subsistence, Moth returned to university to study sustainable agriculture. Installed with her husband in a village in Cornwall. while “the shredded and twisted threads of [leurs] Vies were slowly starting to retire, “Raynor Winn goes back and forth between the present and the past, telling for example the death of his mother or making “a wild silence”: true nature the story of his meeting with Moth (” from the moment he had entered my life, he had filled it to the brim “), evoking the exit from Salt pathas well as their close relationship to nature.

While Moth’s state of health seems to deteriorate. the weight of community life and sedentary lifestyle will push them to go hiking in Iceland with two friends to immerse themselves in the wild.

Is all this too good to be true? Some people think. A recent investigation by the British weekly The Observer came a few weeks ago to give a new flavor. to this beautiful story of resilience. Among other things. there were doubts about the medical diagnosis of her husband and the context of the seizure of their house, while evoking stories of fraud. But the truth, in literature, is often what separates us from a good story. The fact remains that. “a wild silence”: true nature faced with the controversy, the publication of the fourth story by Raynor Winn, scheduled for October in the United Kingdom, was returned to the Greek calendars.

In any case, Raynor Winn remains an excellent storyteller. But was this suite, diluted and a little disjointed, necessary? Maybe not.

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