Book: Child’s Play by David Malouf
In despair at my loss of motivation for reading during this depressing pandemic, I've finally set myself the task of rereading a series of books that I read and loved as a younger adult. The criteria for selection are that they should be short (usually less than 250 pages) and I must have recommended them to friends repeatedly over the years. I have selected:
Child's Play by David Malouf
The Lost Honour of Katerina Blum by Heinrich Böll
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller... by Italo Calvino
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Tartar Steppes by Dino Buzatti
And so, to the first …
Child’s Play by David Malouf
Somewhere in Italy, in the eighties, a terrorist/anarchist is preparing his mission. He will assassinate a major man-of-letters, an intellectual giant, a philosopher. I imagined, say, someone of the stature of Umberto Eco or Bertrand Russell. Everything is anonymous; we don’t know his cause; his victim is unnamed; the place too. He shares an office with four other conspirators, all sporting pseudonyms, all preparing their own undisclosed attacks. Eventually one of them heads off on her mission and a new one takes her place. Some unnamed organisation is directing all this.
We pass the book inside the head of this assassin. He does his research on the victim, scours photos of the piazza where the attack will be carried out, evaluates his colleagues, never betrays his motives and eventually heads off on his mission.
This is a fabulous portrait of a man blindly going about his mission, questioning everything but the mission itself. The writing is poetic and thoroughly convincing. In rereading it, I was surprised to find that my recommendation to friends was entirely based on the dénouement. Somehow it erased all the rest for me and left me believing it was the only thing recounted in the book. Memory is so deceptive.
Asynchronists 