5 STARS
The killing fields and the wheatgrass, the children playing and the smell.
The field has a sweet kind of stink, when you think about it GOD'S ACRE really ought to mean a wheat field. They say a good person is as good as a piece of bread, at least that's what the teachers teach the children.
The imagery is exquisite, ominous and omnipresent. Told from Adina's viewpoint we experience a series of vignettes that highlight the deprivation, the despair and deadly world around her. It highlights a callousness brought on by harsh conditions, get while the getting is good, for often you go without.
The style of writing is very different than what I'm familiar with. At first, I thought it was an oddity of the translation, but the further I read it became clear that it is more poetry than prose. The perspective and structure creates this surrealist slide show of disturbing realities and ominous intersections. It's like watching a Salvador Dali film, but it isn't fiction, this isn't an escape.
The book is stark realism in poetic form. A juxtaposition of beauty and unvarnished cruelty, and a dismissal. There is a brutal fetishizing of people in the Marxist sense; they are merely a conglomeration of parts and things and this makes it feel clinical in a dehumanizing way. And oddly enough or not, fits bizarrely into communist Romania just before the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu.
There is an earthiness in the handling and description of the human body. It is the opposite of romanticizing, and feeds into the despondency and broken down nature to their lives. Even their bodies are broken. This is a verisimilitude that focuses less on realism and more on disenchantment, the lack of reverence.
And the most disturbing thing about the book is how mesmerizing the prose is, it somehow manages to turn the horrific and the base into these evocative images. But the images of the fields, the children and the bread as described here will stay with me forever. This is incredibly powerful, but quiet.
The bullet holes on the wall are as dense as black skipping stones.
Overall, stunning.
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