![]() ![]() As the technical difficulties pile up, and the sense that something truly awful has happened becomes impossible to ignore, Alam’s characters try to play-act normalcy even as our narrator casually, vaguely lets us in on little hints from the outside world about their impending doom. They’re surprised at night by the owners of the home, who have escaped their own place in the city because of a blackout. Of the stuff I read this year, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Trust Exercise really pulled this off well, but no book I opened was better defined by the brutality of clear-eyed knowledge than Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel Leave The World Behind.Īn apocalyptic story that barely concerns itself with the actual apocalypse at hand, Alam’s book follows a well-to-do New York City couple that takes a vacation out to a rental house on a remote part of Long Island. I love a cruel omniscient narrator-a mind-reading, all-seeing voice in a novel that relays its dramatic events with a matter-of-fact detachment and no regard for the biting cruelty of its honest observations. ![]() This is what the Defector staff enjoyed reading in 2022. ![]()
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