/lit/ - Literature

>>20448684
Sacred and Terrible Air

Surprising as it may sound, Robert Kurvitz intended to write several novels in a row. As the 2013 year edition cover reveals, 'Sacred and Terrible Air' is a preface to the series that, fortunately for the roleplaying game (RPG) 'Disco Elysium' fans, didn't materialize. So instead of writing in an RPG manner, the author decided to create one.

Here is a synopsis for those waiting for the English version of the book (the translation is mine and may be subject to changes upon the official release.).

On the day before the last of the summer break, four daughters of the education minister Ann-Margret Lund disappear on a public beach. A new ship with one thousand five hundred passengers vanishes on its first trip. Three classmates of the missing girls do not stop their search even after twenty years. The world comes to its end, but the hope to find Lund children is still alive.

The book starts slow, with two alternating realities, one of the crime itself, the girls' disappearance, and the second depicting grown-up men who meet again after twenty years to resume an investigation. The parallel lines go hand-in-hand, and there is not much to speculate about. The interesting thing happens when the story strays aside and multiplies to the level of surreal. Differences in time can be one day or one hundred fifty. Space pulsates, expanding to the whole fictional world and then deflating to a single car. Languages - Estonian, Swedish, Russian, Finnish - are shuffled like colors in Rubik's Cube. The stakes rise higher and higher until the slow, yet unstoppable greyness destroys the whole planet.
The central theme of the book is vanishment. Death means vanishment. To vanish means to die. One of the examples is the missing girls. They disappear and stay exceptionally in the minds of their grieving classmates. Nobody cares about them like they never existed. The greyness (similar to the wave in 'Far Rainbow' by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky) is the epitome of vanishment. Everything that it devours dies, if not instantly physically, then mentally.

The book is constructed as an RPG game. In the game, the main character moves, unaware of the upcoming dangers, thus creating a surrounding area map. Yet, in a sense, the map is still unreal, like the contorted figures in the twilight. Like the past and future compared to the right here and right now. The only reality lies in the eyes of the observer.

Communism vs. capitalism, vanishment vs. dizzy reality, and otherworldly Sweden vs. Estonian language. I'd recommend being patient and wait for the English edition. The book is much more than worth reading time.