Winner of the 2015 August Prize, this novel by Khemiri is a definite puzzle. Lauded by booksellers/critics, when I received an ARC of this novel from NetGalley I was struck by the number of reviewers who commented on the style as being similar to a podcast called Serial. Thanks to Google I was able to glean some information about this podcast – and it sounds like something worth checking out – but I did wonder whether there would be something lost in translation.
Perhaps my initial hesitation coloured my reading, but I found it quite hard to settle into reading this. Told in a very fragmented way, it took me a long time to get a handle on the voices of the respective characters and to work out how they were related to Samuel.
We are told that Samuel has died in a car crash, and we do not know if it was an accident or suicide. An unnamed writer decides to interview Samuel’s friends and family members in order to try and find out more about who Samuel was and what happened to him.
Even after finishing the novel I felt I didn’t know much about Samuel. Frustratingly, we got no definitive answer to the question posed and I never felt that I gained a clear perspective of how the writer linked to the object of the investigation. While I can recognise its literary quality, it didn’t have quite the emotional pull for me that means I want to encourage everyone to read it.