Citizen X
Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence may be considered the frontrunner in this year’s Booker Prize longlist, but the book I’m interested in is Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, a detective thriller about the hunt for a serial killer in Stalinist Russia. (Serial killer+Stalin+Russia=I want to read it.) It’s supposed to be based on the events dramatised in the HBO movie, Citizen X.
In this excerpt, two boys go out hunting for a cat. Their village is starving, all the pets and rats have been eaten, and the appearance of a living cat is nothing short of miraculous. They manage to catch the cat, but they get separated, and then. . .
“He was about to call out when he swallowed his words. There was a noise. He turned sharply, looking around. The woods were dense, dark. He shut his eyes, concentrating on that sound—a rhythm: the crunch, crunch, crunch of snow. It was getting faster, louder. Adrenaline shot through Pavel’s body. He opened his eyes. There, in the darkness, was movement: a man, running. He was holding a thick, heavy branch. His strides were wide. He was sprinting straight toward Pavel. He’d heard them kill the cat and now he was going to steal their prize. But Pavel wouldn’t let him: he wouldn’t let their mother starve. He wouldn’t fail as his father had failed. He began kicking snow over the cat, trying to conceal it.
—We’re collecting . . .
Pavel’s voice trailed off as the man burst through the trees, raising the branch. Only now, seeing this man’s gaunt face and wild eyes, did Pavel realize that this man didn’t want the cat. He wanted him.”
Fortunately my cats are not going to read it.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 31st, 2008 at 23:21
Another novel that conforms to the left-hand side of your equation (Serial killer+Stalin+Russia) would be Martin Amis’s House of Meetings. If you havent read it, the main character does your equation one better – he’s actually a serial rapist AND killer, in that order. Most anything Amis I love to plod through , OED in hand, of course.
And speaking of the Booker’s, how about a shout-out for our 4 kababayan’s longlisted (with 17 others) for the prize’s Asian version:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/23/manasianliteraryprize.awardsandprizes?gusrc=rss&feed=books
August 1st, 2008 at 10:31
Talking about cats, they can be found in many of Haruki Murakami’s novels. In one of my favorite works of his, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the protagonist’s “adventure†starts when his wife asks him to look for their missing cat. An excerpt:
“As I listen to the wind-up bird, I’m thinking, Why on earth is it up to me to go searching after that cat? And more to the point, even if I do chance to find it, what am I supposed to do then? Drag the cat home and lecture it? Plead with it–Listen, you’ve had everyone worried sick, so why don’t you come home?
Great, I think. Just great. What’s wrong with letting a cat go where it wants to go and do what it wants to do? Here I am, thirty years old, and what am I doing? Washing clothes, planning dinner menus, chasing after cats.â€
August 1st, 2008 at 12:05
he’s actually a serial rapist AND killer, in that order.
Even better if it were the other way around. :-D