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Indlæser... Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Goneaf Stefan Kiesbye
Indlæser...
Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. Y'all know about southern gothic stories? Well, I guess this is bavarian gothic. Succinctly written with flashes of brilliance. Grimm's fairy tales meets Children of the Corn. ( ) I toyed with two stars but I’m an easy reviewer generally. Sometime after WWII in West Germany some kids grow up in the shadow of a concentration camp. Kiesbye saves that last bit for the final 20 pages. Before we get to that revelation, or twist if you will, people act in bizarre and selfishly cruel ways towards each other. That’s where the a-ha gets you - that concentration camp thingy. The problem for me was there is no subtlety. The behavior is too unbelievably weird over and over again and Kiesbye hits you with basically the same message of selfish callousness until you don’t feel it anymore. These were the same places where a few years before people were cruel on an industrial basis. It’s like, okay we get that already. The author waits too long to pull the pin out of the grenade to where we are already numb to the fact that these people are going to act in the worst possible way in every situation. The knife is dull. The message is weakened. Would have been more effective in a novella length offering IMHO. Sometimes I hate the star ratings on here because my personal feelings about a book don't reflect my critical thinking about it. Critically, this book is probably four stars. Hypnotic and lyrical, beautifully written. Sometimes moving, mostly grim, told without judgment. Had the subject matter been different I probably would have loved it. On a personal level, I hated this. It's a series of interconnected stories all about horrible people doing terrible things. Rapes, murders, lies, secrets. The gang's all here. And because the story is told so dispassionately, there's no emotional center to connect to. The narrators all experience traumas, but then they inflict just as much damage. Only once before has a novel left me this queasy with disgust, and that was primarily because of the author's intent. I didn't finish that one. But I did finish this one, and I suppose that says something. I appreciate this story for its construction, but I didn't enjoy it. This was strange, but in a very good way. A group of former childhood friends return to the remote German village where they grew up many years later for the funeral of one of them. The strange and sometimes brutal events of their childhood are related through the alternating points of views of each of the survivors. Comparisons to Shirley Jackson, William Faulkner, and Gunter Grass are apt, as are comparisons to some of the darker tales of the Brothers Grimm. I will also say I was reminded of Jerzy Kosinki's The Painted Bird. I'm not a fan of horror, and this book occasionally flirts with horror, but the writing is delicious, very different and inventive. For example, "In our village time didn't progress courageously. In our village she limped a bit and got lost more than once...." Or, "The teacher had told them to collect colorful leaves and dry them between sheets of blotting paper imported into the pages of large and heavy books. Now they were trying the method on lizards and blindworms." So strange, but very enjoyable. 4 stars ingen anmeldelser | tilføj en anmeldelse
A village on the Devil's Moor: a place untouched by time and shrouded in superstition. There is the grand manor house whose occupants despise the villagers, the small pub whose regulars talk of revenants, the old mill no one dares to mention. This is where four young friends come of age-in an atmosphere thick with fear and suspicion. Their innocent games soon bring them face-to-face with the village's darkest secrets in this eerily dispassionate, astonishingly assured novel, infused with the spirit of the Brothers Grimm and evocative of Stephen King's classic short story "Children of the Corn" and the films The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke and Village of the Damned by Wolf Rilla. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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