My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Absent is a book about madness. It’s quite unsettling, because we’re in the head of a mother as she goes mad due to the death of her daughter. We see the world through her eyes, so it’s never certain whether we’re experiencing reality or not.
The book is written in short chapters containing short paragraphs, sometimes single sentences, sometimes even sentence fragments. It’s a stream-of-consciousness style, and frankly, it becomes boring after a while, because there’s so much of it. I don’t know if there’s a way to do it better though, given what the author was trying to achieve.
So reading Absent was not a pleasant experience. But given the subject matter, I don’t know how it could be.
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