The boy initially suffers from insomnia, but later on discovers a therapeutic outlet - writing. But none of his stories are about himself. They are always about strangers. A few years later the woman terrorist is captured. The boy finds out her name and sees her photograph. As he grows older he does not manage to permanently break the bond with his mother. And eventually he lives at home again while she works and he runs the household.
Each year, August 23rd, brings something new to his encapsulated existence. The memory of his father had faded long ago. Only the insomnia has remained, reminding him that his life is actually not right, although he has long ago resigned himself to it being his reality.
One morning he finds himself staring at a newspaper page, telling of the release of the woman terrorist who would appear in a talk show on TV that evening. She had been incarcerated for only five years! His mother does not have to tell him, he knows already. Suddenly his life has a purpose again. He will murder this woman. But part of him rebels at the thought! He first wants to confront her, give her an opportunity to save her life, a life that she did not grant his father.
The protagonist does not take the easy way out. The book relates five different phases in his life. It begins with a brief overview of these phases that are then described in detail. Except for the first episode, all are chronologically arranged. Or does this also count for the first one? It is heavily soaked in sadness. Not about his father’s murder, but about the foiled attempt to return to the old paradise - a curt rebuff from his mother that ends in utter coldness. The son, trying to warmly embrace her, slips and injures himself on a sharp edge, sustaining a skin rupture and losing a lot of blood. Actually, the first episode does seems to be at the correct place in the book, because that is the beginning of the child’s path of woe. The comment about this episode is: “When he returned home he discovered the reason his mother only visited him for a few minutes in the hospital [...]; according to her words, it was a huge task to rearrange and clean the bedroom so no traces of anything remained behind.”
A transition narrated later in the book is smooth, unobtrusive and done with great skill - explaining how the child, now a young man, speaks of his murder of the terrorist with a coldness equal to the one his mother had displayed, though the terrorist had not elicited any emotions in him: “That her coat is also interesting - jerking backward, it had already slipped off her shoulder and sailed onto the floor a reasonable distance away; but in a later newspaper photo - I just looked at that again - she lay on top of the coat; a sign someone had placed her there, a sign that my four fired shots [...] mean she lived for a while. So, the ambulance that had arrived was not sent completely in vain.”
No human being having been subjected to such trauma as a ten-year-old can expect to have a normal life. But the book makes that evident only later on; meanwhile the protagonist struggles to somehow lead a normal life. For instance, through his first love encounter. But even there he loses touch with reality. The way the author manages in two or three sentences to paint a total picture of a relationship gone wrong is a stroke of genius.
Readers are no longer surprised that the protagonist tries to avoid his former classmates so he won’t have to witness how their lives turned out all right. But his attempts prove unsuccessful, and he is thus again and again thrown back to his personal dilemmas, long enough for him to eventually accept them. Once accepted, his life takes on meaning and he begins to repair the damages. That accounts for the headline for the fifth episode: “This time he was able to defend himself.”
An absolutely readable book that extends the terrorist debate - for the first time examining how terrorism affects a non-prominent victim.
Did the author fulfill the readers’ expectations? You be the judge!
ISBN 978-3-8015-0390-1, Verlag Neue Kritik (Publishing House New Critics), Frankfurt/Main, 19,50
Read this article in the original German: http://www.epochtimes.de/articles/2008/12/04/378591.html
