ExcerptCyril Massarotto’s fourth novel, written with a mature and steady hand, is filled to the brim with notions of tenderness, transference, and survival, and explores the heart’s astounding capacity to heal in the aftermath of devastation.
Amidst war and destruction, shut away in his house, in the middle of a deserted city, an old man takes a mad risk to provide shelter to an injured young girl. The child is mute, and can only say one word: light, as she is terrified of the dark. And so the old man talks, tells her stories of the beautiful things in life before the war – the little everyday pleasures – and of his hope that they might one day be freed. He teaches her to believe in the future, and she in turn shows him how to experience the present.
Cyril Massarotto explores with the usual finesse and depth found in his first three novels, the father-daughter bond that emerges between two beings who are otherwise worlds apart.
