{"id":2171,"date":"2012-08-03T06:42:01","date_gmt":"2012-08-03T06:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2171"},"modified":"2012-08-04T07:07:35","modified_gmt":"2012-08-04T07:07:35","slug":"the-scream-by-laurent-graff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2171","title":{"rendered":"The Scream by Laurent Graff"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Aurora Metro Books 29 June 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

Translated by Cheryl Robson and Claire Alejo<\/strong><\/p>\n

104pp, paperback, \u00a37.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Even shorter than the movie-length translated novellas published by Peirene Press, The Scream<\/em> by French writer Laurent Graff is a story of cinematic intensity that merges banality and catastrophe with one of the most iconic visual images in the Western canon.<\/p>\n

Its unnamed narrator works at a motorway toll booth, taking the money, lifting the barrier: a conscientious employee whose working routine lends the solid comfort of predictability. But something is wrong. Traffic is dwindling to a trickle. The drivers who do appear are often in terrible pain, faces contorted, bodies convulsing.<\/p>\n

\u2018A shriek, a scream, a howl\u2019 is in the air. It began shortly after Edvard Munch\u2019s world-famous painting The Scream <\/em>was stolen from the Oslo City Museum. Although a handful of people, dubbed the Silent Ones, and all the animals are immune to its ceaseless, ever-louder, ever more agonizing penetration, the rest of humankind, all over the world, is dying from it.<\/p>\n

Our toll booth worker comes across the iconic painting in an abandoned car, in the car park of a local restaurant. It joins his sparse baggage as he finally abandons his humdrum routine and the security of the toll booth to hit the (empty) road.<\/p>\n

Surreal, with its understated themes of apocalypse, eco-crisis and mental breakdown, Graff\u2019s powerfully visual\u00a0vignette dots its near-vacant landscapes with scenes of passing emotional connection \u2013 a car crash involving two men, one of them the husband of, the other the lover of the same woman who now sits between their twin bedsides; a homeless man living in the vacated hotel rooms used for a few hours by illicit couples. Bleakness, detachment\u00a0and empathy sit side-by-side in Graff\u2019s vision, wrapped in a layer of mischievous satire. The Road<\/em> this is not.<\/p>\n

Despite a conclusion perhaps too tidy in its circularity, The Scream<\/em> is a hypnotic tale with a mood of its own: eerie but restrained; eloquent; far from lurid. Graff\u2019s European fable wittily\u00a0seizes on\u00a0an artistic concept and animates it, \u00a0transferring it from\u00a0one creative medium to another. Perhaps\u00a0its next\u00a0evolution will be into\u00a0a graphic novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/p>\n

The unnamed narrator works at a motorway toll booth, taking the money, lifting the barrier: a conscientious employee whose working routine lends the solid comfort of predictability. But something is wrong. Traffic is dwindling to a trickle. The drivers who do appear are often in terrible pain, faces contorted, bodies convulsing. \u2018A shriek, a scream, a howl\u2019 is in the air. It began shortly after Edvard Munch\u2019s world-famous painting ‘The Scream’ was stolen from the Oslo City Museum.[…] in Reviews <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2171"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2190,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171\/revisions\/2190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}