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To read this book, "The Real Life" by Adeline Dieudonné, published by dtv, you need nerves and inner strength.
Do you want to hear?
It's about a family, as the daughter describes her father.
That's right on page two.
On the first page she tells that he is a big game hunter and keeps shooting animals to death and having their heads stuffed and they hang around at home and the children are scared.
On the second page it says: "My father was a colossus. He had broad shoulders like a skinner and hands like a giant. Hands that could chop off the head of a chick just as easily as the crown cap of a bottle of Coke. Besides the trophy hunting my father had two other passions in life, television and drinking whiskey.
And so it continues.
Now and then he even spoke to my mother.
But actually you could have replaced it with a ficus.
He wouldn't have noticed the difference.
My mother was scared.
Fear of my father. "What kind of mother is that? She is nothing, an amoeba, something that sneaks through the house, cooks with great difficulty and tries not to be there at all. Sometimes the father beats the mother because of something green and blue. Then the children stay out of the way as much as possible so that they don't get drawn in. The children are the narrating girl and the somewhat younger, six-year-old boy at the beginning of the book, her brother Gil, whom she is tries to protect as much as possible in this hideous, brutal family, in an ugly suburb.
And then something happens that didn't have to be.
The children buy an ice cream from an ice cream man who arrives with a cart and plays a nice waltz and rings the doorbell, and while he is pouring the cream on the ice cream from the cream maker, the machine explodes and tears the man in half Face away.
The children witness this terrible accident.
And then.
Gil does not recover from the shock at all.
It's not stable anyway.
Now he is silent, grows up and he withdraws from his sister.
More and more animals, dogs, cats, including the mother's little dwarf goat, are disappearing in the settlement.
And gradually you find out.
Why are they disappearing?
He catches these animals and tortures them and torments them and ends up killing them.
But it's a tortured child who does something like that here.
You just can hardly read it and hardly stand it.
And the sister is completely desperate and she wants to get her brother's laugh back.
She is a very gifted girl and she can find quite a few people who encourage her, who help her, who support her.
She always thinks about it: You have to be able to turn back time so that he can be as he was before, that he can laugh again.
I don't want to tell you everything now.
It comes to a head to a very bloody and ghastly end.
It's so horrible that the reader breathes a sigh of relief because it has finally come to a climax.
And why should one read such a terrible book now?
I can tell you that because that's exactly what it says: "Real life."
It's well written.
It does not ignore what happens behind some families, behind some walls, in some houses.
It's very moving, sometimes a little weird.
As exciting as Stephen King.
And because you like this narrator, you love her over time.
And in any case, such a book is better than the mendacious dream ship idylls that are presented to us.
Sometimes you need them too, like sugar cookies.
But this is real life, and you really need to relax at the end of this reading.
But it was definitely worth it.
I think the novel is a stunner.