brendatorres

This is a really strange, dark fairy tale, hilarious and sad. It's underrecognized, so I encourage you to check it out. It takes place at a country house on the outskirts of town, where two adolescents have lived their whole lives. The catalyst for the action is their father's death; their mother died years ago. It's told in the first person, and the narrator has a language full of lively personal idiom that, through its innocence, makes great puns and swerves in meaning. This is all the more impressive in that it was originally written in French; the translation is very impressive. The tale gets darker and darker and through the narrator's take on reality (and language) raises some interesting questions about how socialization affects our ways of dealing with pain. The author teaches philosophy, according to the jacket, and I should add that this would probably be fascinating to anyone interested in Spinoza, as it draws a lot on his philosophy. Apparently. I don't know Spinoza myself, so I couldn't make heads or tails of the narrator's references to the Ethics.

2022-11-14 16:44