Two novels I don't think I'll ever read again: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Paul Lynch's Prophet Song. Just too painful. I'm trying not to think of the final pages of the eighth chapter of the more recent novel. And failing.
Indeed, the moral power of the book is haunting me, as did that of McCarthy's great work. In McCarthy's case it was like looking into the deepest places of cruelty and pain in the human heart and not being able to see much else. Lynch's novel is more ordinary, in a sense. This is just normal life in a typical city in the developed world when things start to fall apart. And the suffering engendered becomes painfully real because it is so ordinary and you can't not think of the pain of all refugees fleeing anyplace and what's happening in Gaza and Lebanon even as I write and what happened in Pinochet's Chile, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the moral imperative is to do something about this, fueled by the outrage, the fury, you can't not feel.
Kafka: A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. Prophet Song is exactly that.
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