The Living Book

How, this novel asks, can you imagine the worst when you are young and life is sunny? The answer lies in the telling of The Living, in which a young mother, with her teenage brother, takes her two small children to a deserted quarry on a hot summer afternoon. Seen through the eyes of the brother, Benoît, the drama plays out with all the power and seeming inevitability of classical tragedy, made all the more intense by the blistering heat of the day.

 

On that blazing hot summer day Benoît, to entertain his nephews, seats them in a gondola and sends them down a cableway to the pylon on the other side of the river. The harrowing story of what follows is narrated in Pascale Kramer’s artfully simple yet transparent prose, evoking the deep reservoirs of feeling that family members cannot voice, perhaps even to themselves.

 

The Living is filled with the vitality of summer. At the same time, it reveals suffering at its most pure and most volatile as the affected people wonder, in the wake of tragedy, whether they should subsist with the living or with the dead.

Publishers Weekly

Swiss novelist Kramer's first work to be translated into English is the Prix Lipp-winning, brutally forthright take on a family unraveling after the accidental death of two young siblings. The children's deaths are heart-stopping: on a joy ride one hot May afternoon, the boys fatally fall out of an elevated gondola as their 17-year-old uncle, Benoît, and their beautiful young mother, Louise, look on in horror. Louise, around whom the novel largely revolves, has come with her children and surly husband, Vincent, to visit her family in a French town called S.; the children's deaths gradually derail the life of each member of the family. Louise moves in a torpor of grief while growing more dependent on Vincent, who lashes out by taking up with an available local girl. Benoit, gnawed by guilt, begins to cling to Vincent, and Louise's mother, still angry at Louise for getting pregnant when she was a teenager, encourages the men to escape while Louise is paralyzed by suffering. Kramer's sensuous, close observation casts a hypnotic spell on the narrative, leaving the reader unable to put it down until the last word. (Dec.)

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