“While I have been looking at the pane, he has been looking through it.”
This book is haunting, sad, hopeful and critical all at once.
I found Cohen's writing poetically beautiful. The story unfolds, and folds around various characters and events, but it doesn’t get chopped up by a whole lot of ‘telling’.
The plot is clever, with solid characterisation, and the family/couple theme is dealt with subtly and yet in depth. We are not directly told Freddy is autistic, and he is never investigated or diagnosed, but Cohen offers plausible insight into the point of view of a person with autism. The idea of alternative and experiential education is explored – in a background sort of way, mostly not directly criticised but definitely questioned – and we come away feeling like their parents’ (especially dad Neel’s) approach was to be blamed for how Freddy’s life turned out in the end.
Now, when I thought I had understood the resolution of the story, Ava reveals it is spun from how she has pieced it together and that she even made up one of the characters. Ah, now what, then? Should we take it that Freddy did not murder the boy? Or do we see this as yet another of her ways of protecting him? I don’t like not being sure at the end of a book.
No Book but the World
by Leah Hager Cohen
(The Clerkenwell Press, 2015)
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