Book Tamers| book reviews

Inspired by the author’s experiences, Knut Hamsun’s novel sits under the sign of hunger and imminent insanity. The autobiographical elements directly mingle with fiction, rendering the narration pretty contemporary.

Restless hunger

The hero, in fact the sole character of the book is a young writer, on the threshold of despair, deprived of any means to support himself. Poor as church mice, Hamsun’s tramp lives day by day only by chance. Otherwise a very intelligent man, his only weapon is his writing, which he sometimes uses to work for a newspaper whose director repays him generously.

Incapable of staying under one roof more than a week, he wanders Christiania’s streets looking for food. The acute hunger sensation doesn’t disappear and his only escape would be writing for the newspaper. But inspiration doesn’t take into account the urgent physiological factors and comes by seldom, giving him, at the same time, ideas like the terrible article on philosophical knowledge, which could obviously not soften the fire in his stomach.

Escape in surrender

“The escape”, his relief, is in his own words. Even if he scolds or encourages himself, his interior monologues were considered forerunners for those met later on in Kafka’s writing, for example. The extravagance of his logic is even more impressive as he realizes his flaws, but he delivers himself to them consciously. He rambles, he knows what he is saying but has no other option. He just surrenders.

Owner of a very imaginative mind, the hungry wanderer builds, like a sad child, stories of magic and glory, where the love story that he craves for unconsciously, has an essential place. Reality makes it so that a woman appears in his life but proves herself to be only a pale version of the one he has fancied in his imagination. Generally, people who find themselves in his way are cold and self-absorbed. Attached to nobody and nothing, the wandering romantic needs a change. A change that he will fully embrace, even If a man in his situation has to take some risks. No matter where they take him.

Written by: Ioana

Sharp objects is, broadly, the story of a “crazy” family, a completely dysfunctional one. Where exactly could this rich, deeply rooted family could express itself better than in a Victorian house in a small American town?

It`s all in the family

Let’s see with who we are dealing with here. One will easily see I am not exaggerating at all. A terrifying grandmother, already dead, but whose presence is still felt; the mother, who feels the urge to take care of her children, so that the permanent illness of her second daughter, dead when the story is told, is, in a very weird way, the exact situation she needed; the youngest daughter, a sociopath, almost a doll in her mother’s house, pathologically craving for love, becoming an alcoholic, a drug addict and a nymphomaniac and a complete dread for the geek girls in her school, which she publicly humiliates.

Sharp Objects

The other challenged family member is Camille, the narrator herself, who deals with her mother’s “treatment” even though this means her own emotional balance will be shaken. This lack of balance manifests itself through the notching of words on each centimeter of her body. The sharp objects avoid only her face and that part of her arm which gets out of the sleeve and a circle on her back. In Chicago, away from her mother, Camille does not feel the need to hurt herself anymore. However, the disappearance of a little girl in her home town, preceded by the murder of another, determines the editor of the newspaper she works at to send her back home. It’s easy to imagine that things could only get worse.

Chasing mystery

“The investigation” is vividly exposed like various memories and their mix form a book of considerable length that I needed to end in a day and a half. But if you buy the book only considering the fact that Stephen King said it scared the hell out of him (I’m actually starting to have serious doubts about him being the author of his horror books) it would be so wrong. I was not scared at all. What got to me was especially the great amount of hints, admirably inserted exactly when you thought you found the murderer. A fashion show with skeletons in a little town’s inhabitants’ closets, on the catwalk of Camille’s mental sanity.

Oh, and yes! The ending…a book that catches you at the last pages is quite rare…

Written by Raluca