Title: Journal d'Hirondelle
Author: Amélie Nothomb
Self-conclusive
Synopsis:
First came the loss of a great love. Then the anesthesia, the blocking of emotions to avoid pain. And later, the discovery that there was no turning back: with the suicide of feelings, the death of the senses was total. Thus begins this intimate and stark book in which a man of changing identity (he used to call himself Urban, then became Innocent) discovers that the only way to recover pleasure is with radically new experiences.
The first threshold to the recovery of desire will be the music of Radiohead. The second, murder. Hired as a contract killer, life makes sense again. Our hero kills for hire, and each bullet brings with it a joy that Urbano consumes in his bed after the murders. And when the victims assigned to him are not enough to satisfy his craving, he satisfies it on the streets, killing strangers chosen at random. Until one day he falls in love with the daughter of a minister... after having killed her, and transgresses the only taboo of hired killers: he crosses the boundaries of intimacy, reading the dead woman's diary.
In Swallow's Diary, Amélie Nothomb's pen is embodied for the first time in a male voice, in a cold and distant I, not without the irony that characterizes the work of the Belgian writer, who challenges us to unveil the secret hidden in the pages of the murderer's diary.
Review:
This time the story is about a man who has suffered a disappointment in love, and because of it he has sunk into a deep depression. He no longer feels pleasure or emotions, nothing causes him those sensations. It is as if he had become a walking carcass.
But by those coincidences of life he listens to the latest Radiohead albums and is surprised to find that he has been moved; but the strangest thing is that he admits that those albums do not transmit anything, and that itself makes him get excited (what do I know, the guy is crazy).
"The brain... it's amazing to what extent grease stains leave traces in their pure state, and grease is never clean.
Everything confirms my metaphysics: the body is not evil, the soul is.
The body is the blood: it is pure.
The soul is the brain: it is fat. The fat of the brain invented evil".
At the same time, he was fired from his job as a deliveryman for having unintentionally run over a person.
It is now that our protagonist gets a new job that will fill him with satisfaction. He becomes a hitman; a serial killer.
He receives orders through a third party (therefore he doesn't even know who he works for) but that doesn't matter to him, the important thing here is that after each murder, his excitement is such that the first thing he does after committing his crimes is to quickly go home and masturbate .....
Everything goes relatively well, until he is commissioned to kill an entire family, and that's when he gets a diary of one of his 16 year old victims and falls "in love" with her.
I found the ending a bit predictable but that doesn't mean it wasn't good.
The story is quite short, so it reads very quickly.
"It is a love story whose chapters have been jumbled together by a madman."
So far, I only read 3 books by this author, and there is one element that is repeated in them, and that is that her stories are full of unhinged, truly crazy characters; with truly unbelievable reasoning but that have logic somehow. And I love this.
I don't know if it will happen in his other books, but at least in these three it will.
It's a recommended book, and from what I know of Amélie, she's an author totally worth reading.
I don't know yet what will be my next reading from her, but I'll keep reading her, I'll keep reading her.
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario