"The compulsive, disturbing story of Ivan, an older teacher, grooming a strange, hungry young girl Tereza"
I read this book in one sitting, which I haven’t done in months. The book is not only slim and formatted in extracts that read like poetry fragments, but the story is also utterly compulsive, like retching. Part of its momentum comes from its disturbing content – TW for disordered eating, grooming, and paedophilia – like being unable to look away from a true crime documentary, always wondering if it will go as far as you worry it will. The story of an older male teacher and an outsider female student feels both surprising and horribly inevitable. The comparisons to Lolita are inevitable – I confess I’ve never finished Lolita, but this book with its inclusion of both the first-person disturbing hungers of Tereza and third-person of Ivan creates a different, more distant view into their relationship. The book cover and back are also stylish – there’s a list of numbers which we realise are the age gap between Ivan and Tereza: 12/50 – 18/56.
| Primary Genre | Fiction in translation |
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