Blogs
on 8 hours ago
<img src="https://jetblacklimo.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/nyc-new-york-new-york-city-4681060.jpg"; style="max-width:430px;float:left;padding:10px 10px 10px 0px;border:0px;" alt="" />FIRE by John Boyne (Doubleday £12.99, 176pp)
Fire is available now from the Mail Bookshop
THIS unpleasant little book by The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas author preys so purposefully on the reader's emotions it left me feeling a bit grubby.
Freya is a <a href="https://www.caringbridge.org/search?q=burns%20specialist">burns specialist</a> who spends her days easing the pain of those torched by fire.
Yet following a ghastly experience when she was 12, in which she was left for <a href="https://jetblacktransportation.com/blog/town-car-service-new-york-city-reviews/">JetBlack</a>; hours trapped underground by two <a href="https://openclipart.org/search/?query=malevolent">malevolent</a>; brothers, she has devoted her private life to a dysfunctional campaign of sustained ‘revenge' involving random adolescent boys.
Boyne presents his novel rather like a psychological thought experiment, inviting the reader to evaluate both the impact of Freya's experience on her behaviour and the innate nature of evil.
Yet he gives us so little of Freya's internal life, the novel feels as clinical and hollow as she does.
EUROTRASH by Christian Kracht (Serpent's Tail £12.99, 192pp)
Eurotrash is available now from the Mail Bookshop
A MAN, Christian, takes his 80-year-old mother, recently discharged from an asylum, on a road trip across Switzerland with the aim of dispersing the money she has accrued from investing in the arms industry.
She survives on lies, screw-top wine and prescription barbiturates; he is a disenchanted, easily repulsed middleaged writer.
Together they sustain (just about) a wary entente. More resonantly, it involves a reckoning with a particularly toxic family legacy: Christian's father was abusive; his maternal grandfather an active Nazi sympathiser.
Spiky and definitely a bit difficult, Eurotrash is a sequel to Kracht's 1995 novel Faserland and is perhaps best appreciated as a companion piece to that earlier novel.
AND THE WALLS BECAME THE WORLD ALL AROUND by Johanna Ekstrom and Sigrid Rausing (Granta £16.99, 336pp)
And The Walls Became The World All Around is available now from the Mail Bookshop
SIGRID RAUSING is a renowned philanthropist and the author of a memoir of her brother's descent into heroin addiction.
This book is the story of another descent, that of her best friend Johanna Ekstrom, a poet and writer who died of cancer in 2022.
Before she died, Ekstrom asked Rausing to complete her final work, a book that began as the story of a doomed love affair but, as her illness took grip, inevitably became a meditation on loss of a different kind. Ekstrom's notebooks, 13 in all, make up the bulk of the text.
But Rausing is as present in the book as her dead friend, her accompanying editorial notes resembling a form of loving and extremely attentive conversation across the divide.
This collection of thoughts and observations on love, grief and selfhood, written with the self-consciousness of those who have spent a lot of time in psychoanalysis, is a book Rausing had to publish rather than one the common reader needs to read.