Synopsis:
The latest craze in entertainment television programs is called "Concentration". A television crew raids the streets of Paris to recruit participants for this reality show, choosing randomly from the population. The participants will be transported to the set in sealed wagons, like those used to transport Jews during the Nazi extermination era, and will be interned in a camp where other contestants play the role of kapos. Under the strict surveillance of the TV camera, the prisoners will be beaten and humiliated in any way, anything goes as long as the ratings go up. The most awaited moment comes when, every week, the viewers can participate in the contest thanks to the televote: without leaving their homes they can eliminate-execute one of the participants of the show.
Pannonique, a student of breathtaking beauty, is recruited and becomes number CKZ 114 in the televised concentration camp. The first mistreatment in this sinister place consists, then, in the loss of identity, in the suppression of one's own name. Zdena, an unemployed woman who, of course, has also received a new identity, discovers in Pannonique her antagonistic double and falls madly in love with her. Good and evil forming a fatal couple: the victim and the executioner, and also the beauty and the beast. When the audience has to vote, there is a media uproar, but although the viewers protest, they all vote, and the hypocritical and unconscious sadism of the public, who deplore the horror but are unable to miss an installment, comes to light. In the meantime, Pannonique and the rest of the contestants put their lives on the line?
A violent satire of reality television, voyeurism, ignominy, (easy) good conscience, moralizing denunciation. A story that serves as a critique of a brutal and crude world of hypocrisy, where the individual has lost all freedom of action because anything can make a profit: a world in which even the denunciation of the system belongs to the system. Through these terrible pages comes to us the metaphor of a society in which suffering becomes a spectacle.
Review:
Hi! Well, this is the second book I read by Amélie and it didn't blow my mind as it happened to me with "Cosmetics of the Enemy" (which by the way has a review on the blog) but the idea was good. I got hooked several times in this cold and dark world of Amélie Nothomb.
We are shown a world where a new TV program, reality show style, has started to be broadcast, showing more or less what the concentration camps were like.
For this, people are kidnapped and subjected to the same conditions that the Jews were subjected to at the time. But this is not acted at all, everything is 100% real and everyone knows it.
"The time came when the suffering of others was no longer enough for them: they had to turn it into a spectacle."
Examinations are also held to select "kapos" who would be like the guards, and who would be authorized to torture the prisoners and even decide who died and who did not.
Among these kapos is the kapo Zdena, a girl who falls in love in a sickly way with a prisoner, you will imagine that the prisoner is our protagonist no? this prisoner is Pannonique.
This kapo is characterized for having zero empathy, the obsession she feels for Pannonique will make you realize how crazy she is.
Here the prisoners will no longer be known by their real name, but will be named by their license plate which is a series of three letters followed by three numbers.
Pannonique will be called CKZ114.
The kapo will have an unhealthy obsession with CKZ114, and in knowing what her real name is, to which she will not answer, and which will make the poor prisoner the victim of the most brutal beatings.
"God is all the more necessary when his absence is most evident".
And to this we must add all the public who watch these images from their homes, thinking how wrong it is that this program exists, but who do not even think of changing the channel.
Well, you will see that the idea is fascinating, a program where a concentration camp is recreated? wow! what a mind Amélie has.
This book plays a lot with morals. The whole country sees how people are tortured, they are offended by the treatment, they are offended by the program, they are angry with the wickedness of the kapos, but they love the reality show.
The truth is that I liked it, this book (or rather, the author's universe) apparently is full of sick, crazy, unhinged characters... creating stories of the most striking.
By the way, I couldn't help but remember "The Hunger Games" while reading it, so if you liked that trilogy you'll probably like this story too.
"When you cut up a live fish it doesn't scream either, does that lead you to conclude that it doesn't suffer either, kapo Zdena?"
As I told you before, I didn't love it as much as "Enemy Cosmetics" but I did like it.
I will continue to read more books by this author who by the way I think has almost 30 books published, great no!
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario