The end of the world would be nothing but boring. No matter the religious or the secular projection, the literary description or the poetry of it. There should be a great noise and worlds collide and tremendous skies opening...you know it.
In Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam there is a kind of boom heard around, but it is wrapped in a pinky - flamingo-like (note: I have no intention to denigrate the poor birds who happen to be my favorites, just for the record) - cloud of comfort and slight daily-alienation. From a certain viewpoint, it is fully in line with the predictable life of the characters: a middle-class American couple spending their week in an AirBnb apartment in the Hamptons together with their children. In the middle of their average vacation, the owners of the apartment, a Black middle-class couple, are back from NYC without prior notification and they spent the last days together before leaving the world behind.
I have a bad habit of rarely giving up books that I start - especially novels that receive a certain public notoriety. On one side it is the curiosity to challenge my own literary values with someone else´s, on the other is a professional curiosity to understand why exactly some novels do receive such a welcome, what does it say about our values and mentalities (sorry, I studied history, French-style, Annales kind of school). Lately though, I realized that I wasted way too much time of my precious life with books that are not going anywhere.
Don´t take me wrong. As someone who happens to deal sometimes with very very badly written books, not all of them self-published - some sent to me for translation in various languages - I don´t blame the writing in the book. There are style-related aspects that I loved in the book, for instance, how the silence between the characters is filled with words and meanings, making sense of their thoughts. How, for instance, all the characters are allowed their own voice and how together they create a dialogue. The fine irony of the episodes following the meeting between the two couples.
But the technocratic self-sufficiency described in all its manifestations, over and over again - excuse my French - bores me to tears. At least, after going through all this for eight hours I am allowed to say it. The matrix of those couples can be translated in any genre - from crime to romance - but as in real life, there is a finality, a sense which is missing from this arrangement. In real life I don´t have nothing to do with such humans, in literary encounters even the less. And from now on, I promise myself to just give up following a book whose way of ending the world is so unspectacular.
Rating: 2 stars
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