Hope: A Tragedy

I'm unusual, I think, among bloggers.

I don't have a book in me.

I'm not saying I don't enjoy writing (obviously), or that I don't enjoy (very much) people reading what I write (hint) but I've got no half written scraps of a novel, no idea, no characters bursting to be given life on the page.  Fundamentally I've got no imagination. Not like that anyway.

So I'm always a little bit in awe of people who do.  Who can wake up one morning and think:  "Here's an idea for a book: what if someone bought a house in a country town and then found Anne Frank living in the attic?"

To take an example not entirely at random.

That's it.  The germ (at least as I imagine it) of the plot of Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander.  Doesn't it make you want to read it? Isn't it such a simple, genius idea?   Imagine that Anne Frank hadn't died.  Imagine what that would do to the iconography and industry around her and her diary.  Imagine what it would be like to be a geriatric Anne Frank, still hiding.  Or the person who found her.

It's a fascinating book. An extraordinary book.  A book that did make me laugh and didn't make me cry, rather to my surprise.  A book that, if I think about it too much, I find very disturbing and frightening and really rather bleak, but which I recommend to you anyway.

In the spirit of hope: I hoped, when I picked up The Drop by Michael Connolly (lent to me by a friend) that it would be better than I was expecting.  It wasn't.  Not a tragedy, but a waste of time nonetheless.


Images, as usual, from Amazon. Thank you to them.