Girdle Women In Nylons

The room (Emma Donoghue)

ORIGINAL TITLE: Room
TRANSLATION: Eugenia Vázquez Nacarino
AUTHOR: Emma Donoghue
EDITORIAL: Alfaguara

ISBN: 978-84-204-0661-9
PAG: 379
PRICE: 21 €

BACK:

For Jack, a boy of five years, room is the whole world, the birthplace, where he eats, plays and learn. At night, Mom puts you to sleep in the cupboard, if the Old Nick is ... For her mother, the person is the cubicle where he has been imprisoned seven years. With great tenacity and ingenuity, has created in this small living space for your child, and her love for him is all he can bear the unbearable. But the curiosity of one grows with the desperation of the other. Only plot the fled is a more risky plan than either could imagine.

Drawing on cases as dramatic and archiconocidos of Natascha Kampusch and Elizabeth Fritzl , Emma Donoghue writes a stark and terrible history, in which a woman is kidnapped at age nineteen and over seven is held in a room of 3x3 m2 ridiculous, where the only window to the outside world is a small window which can not. During that time giving birth to the son of his kidnapper, a boy who becomes his lifeline and the only reason they want to stay alive.

This startling story is told through the voice of that child who is now five years. Although the book is divided into five chapters (Gifts, denials, Dying, and Living After) two distinct parts. One half shows how the every day in this dump. Mechanical absolutely routine in which they move, from rising until they reach the 9 pm, when Jack must get to sleep in the closet before it gets "old Nick" (which is what they call their kidnapper). Where we see the daily effort to the mother build an environment that is pleasant to Jack and make him a happy boy, well educated and healthy, but inevitably Jack is growing increasingly more complicated makeup is a life like that take and answer all your questions. The only solution to have a future hope is to escape from that place and try to get his life outside these walls.

Of course, the other half of the book will show what happens when they get out of the room. Which apparently should be a joy for Jack becomes a nightmare and feels cheated by many of the things your mother was telling. Dreams of returning to "the room" and recover their belongings and space. The shock of reality will be hard for both. To Jack because it moves in a world completely unknown and his mother because he has been a long time and the world she knew has changed too.

For Jack the room where she could hardly move was his only world and for your safety. It used to follow a schedule of meals, exercise, reading. For him everything he sees on television is a lie ("dogs are TV," "cats and rocks are TV," "ice cream is tele "...) and the clash with the real world will be enormous . Not known to interact with others (family now), is unable to separate from her mother (still at the breast), continually faced with things, because it has no spatial perception and their view is not used to looking in the distance. The feeling that Jack is a child more than it seems because the subjects taught her mother disappears on reaching the outside, which often involves as a baby, I confess there were moments that made me want to give him a slap. Sorry, but true.

Emma Donoghue

The book I liked it, but there are a couple of things that have just convinced me that for me do not round at all. I find it very difficult to believe that a five year old can talk that way. I understand that circumstances make it a special child, his mother taught him everything that has been in his hand and as in many other facets reacts almost like a baby really shines when talking and do math.

Another unbelievable thing has been how to get out of "the room. I found it all very rushed. In this case I think the performance or the mother or the child, but especially the old "Nick", but somehow had to get out, to continue with the second part of the book.

I would have liked, for instance, to go deeper into the character of the kidnapper, even in the child's mother (who by the way, I had not said, but did not know his name at any time. In fact, nor the child knows that his mother has a name other than "mama" until they come out). I believe that in choosing to tell the story through Jack, all that is removed.

Old Nick When crunching the bed, listening and counting by fives on his fingers: two hundred and seventeen crunches today. Whenever I have to tell until he makes a groan and. I do not know what would happen if I stopped counting, because they always tell.

And the nights when I'm asleep?

I do not know, maybe Mama account.

two hundred and seventeen After all is silent.

Despite of my "buts" I will give four worms, because during the first part of the book has managed to take within that "room" and live with their routine and monotony. Clearly this is a book drive, we will not cheat, that despite being told by a child, is very well written, which reads as you engage in one sitting, who during his reading gave me the feeling of holding breathing and between chapter and chapter had to take a breath, but above all a book that reveals the amazing ability of humans to survive in the worst of situations. read it and thought "I had not been able to survive that way," But ... Is that true? Fortunately, life has never let me put in a situation even remotely similar, so who knows what we would be able to survive and even more so when a child is up to us to do?

(courtesy of Alfaguara Novel)

Photographs used:

- the book: http://www.alfaguara.com/ uploads/imagenes/libro/portada/201011/portada-habitacion.jpg
- from the author: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20100907/100907_booker_prize/20100907/?hub=CP24Entertainment