Recommended by New York Times Book Review Compassionate and thought-provoking." –BRIT BENNETT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half "A searing portrait of the complicated women caught in the orbit of a serial killer. Notes on an Execution is nuanced, ambitious and compelling.” -Katie Kitamura, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (Editors' Choice) beautifully drawn, dense with detail and specificity. NEW YORK TIMES BEST CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR.In our fascination, we’re all implicated. We keep watching, and we keep turning the pages. The seduction of the serial killer narrative is difficult to shake, for reader and author alike. Perversely, some of the novel’s propulsive power comes from the very conventions it fails to abandon. And as much as the novel may wish to dismantle the mythos of the serial killer, in many ways, the Ansel who emerges - particularly in the sections centered on the various women - reinforces it. But it is also true that Ansel remains at the heart of the novel, functioning as the story’s conceptual negative space. is in part, and often powerfully, a novel about these women. The reader never fully identifies with Ansel, but that seems precisely the point: We don’t need to identify with him in order to understand that his execution is a horror and an outrage. In this way, the novel pushes the reader to think about both the uses and the limitations of empathy in fiction. Instead, it is the inevitability of Ansel’s execution and the moral abyss of capital punishment that floods the novel with dread. There is no question of who did what, or even why. The narrative tension that animates Girl in Snow is again present, but this time it has a different source. This novel is defiantly populated with living women it ruminates on trauma, the criminal justice system and guilt. Kukafka aims to undo some of these conventions, including the preoccupation with dead women, in order to explore more ambiguous and ambitious terrain. Kukafka moves nimbly among those multiple strands.
0 kommentar(er)
