Heatwave

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I think this is to further drive home that other people live silent isolated lives with their own internal struggles that we cannot see. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior.

He was strangled by the ropes of a swing, like one of those children you read about in the newspapers. As the holiday is coming to the end, Leo witnesses something, and what he chooses to do or not do is most of the premise of this coming of age story.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society.

A searing hot summer in the South of France: 17-year-old Léonard is spending the holidays on a camping ground with his parents and his siblings. Frozen into inaction, he watches Oscar struggle to breathe until finally his body comes loose and falls lifeless to the ground. A short but powerful novella that explores rumination on death and guilt as interrupters of normal quotidian life. A mesmerizing, "fiery page-turner" ( Entertainment Weekly) about a teenage boy on summer vacation who makes an irrevocable mistake and becomes trapped in a spiral of guilt and desire--in the tradition of Alice McDermott' s That Night and E.Instead of coming to Oscar’s aid, Leonard remains frozen, watching him struggle for air and eventually die. Originally published in France with the title La Chaleur, Heatwave is Victor Jestin’s debut novel, masterfully translated into English by Sam Taylor, who has also translated Leïla Slimani’s work. But while reading I got a bit restless, from the moment Leo saw Oscar I wanted to know what happened and why. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). A prizewinning sensation in France and now stunningly translated by Sam Taylor, Heatwave is Victor Jestin’s unforgettable debut—a searing portrait of adolescent desire and recklessness, and secrets too big to keep.

They’d made the announcement through the loudspeakers attached to the pine trees, one of which was just above my tent. Doch das Leben ist kein Wünsch-dir-was, erst recht nicht für einen Teenager wie Léo, der mit seinen jüngeren Geschwistern und Eltern die Ferien auf einem Mega-Camping im Zelt verbringen muss. The very first sentences spell out the reason for Leo’s feeling of doom: “Oscar is dead because I watched him die and did nothing. Over the next twenty-four hours, Leo wanders around the campsite like a sleepwalker, haunted by guilt and fear, and distracted by his desire for a girl named Luce.

What it lacks in size, it makes up for with an intense atmosphere, intriguing and interesting characters, and a disturbing plot. We meet him around 24 hours before their departure, as Léo, by coincidence, witnesses the suicide of his friend Oscar. On the final Friday of the trip, unable to sleep, Leonard goes for a walk and sees one of the boys from the campsite, Oscar, hanging from the rope of a playground swing.

The blurb immediately gave me goosebumps, a seventeen-year-old who finds another boy killing himself, and decides in a split second, to bury the boy. Alieno al divertimento obbligatorio, alle performance sessuali tipicamente estive, oppresso dal caldo e dalla solitudine, rimane avvolto in un bozzolo incomprensibile perfino a lui (ha solo diciassette anni, che ne può sapere? Interesting novella and premise about a 17 year old French boy spending two weeks with his family at a campground but the sea. A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. If so, could Leo be an unreliable narrator and, like in Camus’ novel, the death that occurs is a murder - did Leo actually murder Oscar, because he was jealous of his being with Luce, the girl he fancies, and Leo distanced himself from the crime like he distances himself from everything else in his life, pretending the swings killed him instead?Der Schlussakkord am Ende dieser atemlosen Novelle ist absolut stimmig, dennoch hätte ich mir ein anderes Ende gewünscht. I raced through the novella, appreciated the brevity of the writing and the emotions of the character.