S̶e̶a̶n̶'s Reviews > The Son

Less digressive than The Coming, but still loose in its plot and aimless in its distracted stroll toward yet another mildly revelatory closing. It sort of reads like one of Thomas Bernhard's monologists narrating a perverse satire of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, set in post-Communist Montenegro. (And Bernhard is in fact name-checked here.) Darkly amusing at times but in general a rather bleak affair.

One moment of blind faith in anything, even in the most utter nonsense, brings a person more happiness than all the reason and knowledge in the world; for reason and knowledge do nothing but destroy any possibility of happiness and reveal everything we've tried to link our life to as worthless. That's why we float like balloons, bloated to bursting point with reason, just waiting for the moment when one tiny extra bit of knowledge will blow us to smithereens – when our body, as fragile as the membrane of a balloon, explodes from the despair which fills us.