Shortlisted for the 2012
Booker Prize, this is a short, funny and disturbing novel about mental illness. Two English couples, one with a 14-year-old daughter, holiday in a villa near Nice. As the back cover explains: “Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's wife allow her to remain?”
This book reminded me of
The Accidental (2005) by Ali Smith, which also sees a mysterious stranger moving in with a family and transforming their lives. And the intense relationships unfolding by the pool of a hot holiday villa made me think of
The Pregnant Widow (2010) by Martin Amis.
Kitty Finch, we soon learn, is “mental”. As the story unfolds you know it can’t end happily. It’s a hugely intelligent piece of work that distills the complexity of human human behaviour into economical sentences.
No comments:
Post a Comment