01

Jan

~lionel shriver~ we need to talk about kevin

wnttakRead it in: probably 10 days

As you might have guessed, anything to do with mass murder and children makes me fascinated.  My choice in books to read really does reflect this, I feel.  At first, when this book came out a couple of years ago, I dismissed it as airport novel material, you know, with the hooking plotline that keeps you reading but really with no literary significance.  So it was finally seeing it for a very decent price at my favourite second hand book stall, along with the tag that it had won the Orange Prize (not quite sure how the Orange Prize differs from other prizes, but it certainly is a recommendation in itself), I decided I had to buy it and read it.

If you don’t already know, the basic premise is that our protagonist Eva is trying to come to terms with the fact that her son killed several of his classmates and is now in jail.  Eva wonders, of course, what went wrong, and spends much of the book trying to come to terms with a son she never really learned to love.

This book surprised me in more ways than one.  First of all, the characters were not entirely likeable.  Most of them had likeable aspects, but the unlikeable ones were perhaps emphasised more than the likeable ones.  At the heart of it, it is about blame, and most of the book revolves around the question of whether Kevin’s mother can really be called responsible, at least in part, for Kevin’s deed.  It starts right back at the beginning, even before the conception of Kevin, going through every stage of his life with incredible detail.  We hear about all his exploits as a child, Eva’s attempts to love him despite these, the hardships the small family go through and the shocking events that occur at Kevin’s hand.

I described it to my mother as a ‘parental horror story’.  It is horror in a sense, but probably a type of horror most affective for people who have had children.  It is about a child who seems to have gone wrong in every way, yet there is nothing in the child’s upbringing that is abnormal in any way.  Kevin as a child and as an adolescent was never happy with his place in the world, was never happy with the world itself.  He was the child that was impossible to understand, impossible to please, impossible to punish, who loved to destroy and injure others.  Yes, I found it a little chilling.

Shriver does write well, I have to say.  She (yes, Lionel is a she) creates a great sense of suspense throughout the book, written as letters from Eva to her husband, through which we grasp some details of the actual events but not all.  It is only at the very end that we realise what exactly occurred, in its full-blown, descriptive horror.

And like most things I enjoy reading, it delves into the philosophical aspects to this question.  Shriver talks about good and evil, about nature vs. nurture, about motherly love, distrust, hate, apathy and infamy.  Shriver depicts only one family whose child commits a school shooting – yet these things occur several times a year, therefore there must be hundreds of families by now who go through a very similar process to this.  Something that you would usually pass off, thinking more about the victims of such a tragedy than the perpetrator, as almost cliched these days becomes something big, a 450 page epic detailing decades of life.

It’s quite depressing, it definitely doesn’t leave you with much hope left, so read something happy once you finish it.

Read it if you: don’t mind tragedy, are interested in any of the philosophical things listed above, want a different kind of psychological horror

While reading listen to: Metric Help I’m Alive (Acoustic), Florence + The Machine No Light No Light, U2 Numb

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Horror/Last Name S

////////////

31

Dec

~jonathon safran foer~ everything is illuminated

eilRead it in: around two weeks

I really quite like all of Jonathon Safran Foer’s works that I’ve read.  In both Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated, he takes something that is conventional, something that is already overdone – in the former’s case, September 11, in the latter’s, the Holocaust – and yet he manages to turn it into a piece of writing that stands out completely from all others.

One reason is that he has a very interesting style of writing.  In ELAIC (I’m not going to type the full title every single time) he used pictures as well as words, he put pen-marks on pages, he put text on top of text, in short, the book was full of surprises.  This book was less full of surprises in that sense, but it was his first work after all, and we can’t expect a writer to pull out all stops in their first work.  They have to experiment a little first, after all.

This book was actually created out of Foer’s university thesis, which traced a period of his own family history.  So it seems quite personal to Foer himself, like a private memoir of sorts.  He structures this novel in an interesting fashion as well.  It’s told through many different means and several different perspectives.  There are letters from the protagonist’s translator (in bad English) detailing his day-to-day life and talking about the protagonist’s novel.  There is the narrative of the protagonist’s very early descendent, and then of his later descendents.  There is also the narrative of the protagonist’s journey through Ukraine to find out about his family history.  In short, this is a novel about history and also about the discovery of such history.  It is a memoir in more ways than one.

So, as all of Foer’s books do, this one pokes and prods at those deep and meaningful questions as well.  It does this in a humorous way and it does this in a very tragic way.  He gives us little hypotheses about life as well, small things we never knew about nor would ever think about had we not come across it.  Example:

‘THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS
(for a complete listing of revelations, see APPENDIX Z32. For a complete listing of genesises, see APPENDIX Z33.)
The end of the world has come often, and continues to often come.  Unforgiving, unrelenting, bringing darkness upon darkness, the end of the world is something we have become well acquainted with, habitualized, made into a ritual.  It is our religion to try to forget it in its absence, make peace with it when it is undeniable, and return its embrace when it finally comes for us, as it always does.
There has yet to be a human to survive a span of history without at least one end of the world.  It is the subject of extensive scholarly debate whether stillborn babies are subject to the same revelations – if we could say that they have lived without endings.  This debate, of course, demands a close examination of that more profound question: Was the world first created or ended?  When the Lord our God breathed on the universe, was that a genesis or a revelation?  Should we count those seven days forwards or backwards?  How did that apple taste, Adam?  And the worm you discovered in that sweet and bitter pulp: was that the head or the tail?’ (pg. 210)

I like Foer’s prose, and I like the way he easily strikes at the heart of what it means to be human.  His characters do strange things, inexplicable things, and sometimes you don’t know whether to love them or hate them for what they have done.  But his characters, overall, are incredibly human, and this is quite refreshing in the current literary world.

For a first work, I’d say this has to be a winner.  It’s well-written, an interesting read, full of history, humor and tragedy.

Read it if you: are interested in history, especially Holocaust/Jewish history, like meaty characters, don’t mind experimental literature

While reading listen to: Low Roar The Painter, The Antlers Kettering, The Cinematic Orchestra To Build a Home

11 years ago Short URL Comments

Historical fiction/Last Name F/Literature/Memoir/Postmodern literature

////////////

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.