Less unpleasant, more stylish, but ultimately sentimental is All the Light We Cannot See, where the horrors of World War II are visited in vivid present tense on sympathetic characters in machine-gun chapters reminiscent of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series. The craven moral of the story seems to be, pay anyone who kidnaps your relative a million dollars as quickly as possible, ignoring the fact that they will then kidnap your other relatives, or even the same one again, as is repeatedly pointed out throughout this exhaustingly unpleasant book. Somehow the whole mess gets blamed on her father, who takes 12 days to pay Mireille’s million-dollar ransom (though how quickly he could or should have paid it, we are never told). She said these things over and over until I was able to believe them. She told me my name and that I had a husband and son waiting for me. She said, “There now,” as she carefully pried my fingers loose from the wire cutters.
She knelt next to me, and pulled my arms down from over my face. She shooed the men away and closed the door so we were alone. But I think we knew that.Īn overdependence on thudding anaphora creates a drearily repetitive quality to Gay’s prose which gets increasingly tedious, as with this paragraph of seven sentences beginning with “She”: The point of all this eludes me, unless it is to emphasize-yes, to really emphasize, because it is undoubtedly worth emphasizing-that no matter how much of a jerk someone is, they don’t deserve to be kidnapped, raped, and tortured. Then, because she is insane, she runs away some more. Her complete absence of introspection only increases throughout the novel as she is kidnapped, raped, and tortured for 12 days, leaving her mangled and insane. The protagonist, Mireille, is an entitled lawyer from a wealthy Haitian family, arrogant and unlovable, with a puzzling habit of running away so that her fiancé has to go in search of her. So ugly and revolting is the Haiti she describes, that her book could have been financed by the tourism council of a rival destination. It is not clear to me who Gay’s intended readership is. Hannah screams for a half second but quickly muffles it with her own hand. The officer sits by the door with his legs straight out in front of him and peers out into the street. The second laughs: a strange, puzzled laugh, as if he does not quite believe the Germans would come to his country and leave a city like this behind. The first has only a rope for a belt and is so thin, he does not have to unknot it to slide off his trousers. They seem partly like sheepish schoolboys and partly like lunatics with an hour left to live. The two boys, in particular, smell toxically of it. All are filthy beyond comprehension, but somewhere in the previous hours, they have taken the liberty of splashing themselves with women’s perfume. Two cannot be a day older than seventeen. I did not bother to look at myself.ĭoerr describes a German orphanage at the mercy of Russian soldiers: The mirror in the bathroom was still shattered and what remained was still stained with my blood. He said, “Be smart,” and steered me to the bathroom holding me by my hair. When TiPierre looked away, I started running toward where I thought the front door was. Something gritty collected between my toes. The taste of blood and men filled my mouth, ran between my teeth.
I followed TiPierre back to the bathroom. My body was not my body it was less than nothing. Gay’s kidnapped protagonist is brutalized endlessly by her captors: Known connections to this year’s contenders: “None.” Currently he is composing for theater, television, film, and dance, as well as album projects. Merritt has made 10 Magnetic Fields albums, including his popular 1999 album 69 Love Songs. Composer Stephin Merritt records under the band names the Magnetic Fields, the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, and Future Bible Heroes.