Heaven

"Heaven is a very short, deeply claustrophobic novel of two children in what Americans would call middle school—what we’d call early secondary school—who, for different reasons, are bullied by their peers. Eventually they get to know each other. The girl sends the boy a note and they meet up where nobody can see them and they talk about how they can or should deal with what they are experiencing. The bullying scenes are not particularly explicit, but they are some of the most frightening things I’ve ever read. For anyone who has been bullied, you will feel yourself back in that space—barely able to breathe, wondering what you are going to do, how you are going to get out of there. The girl feels they are actually better and stronger because they have been bullied, because their suffering must amount to something, must create something. The boy is less convinced, he feels that to endure, to survive. Is enough. It’s a delicate book that is also, in its way, incredibly savage. The sense of pain and suffering in it is at some times overwhelming. But the girl’s extraordinary intellect and defiance, and the boy’s attempts to survive the humiliations of his peers, are beautifully rendered. But these 230 pages act as a a tiny capsule, taking you back to the time you felt at your most vulnerable, and felt that no one was going to come and save you. Yes. As I’ve said before, it’s not comparing apples and oranges, it’s comparing apples and washing machines. Frequently fiction is not simply a different kind of fruit, it’s a different type of thing altogether. Literary prizes, by their very nature, are a subjective act of will by a group of people trying to communicate their enthusiasm for books that have moved and challenged and stimulated them. Of course, they cannot be compared to two runners in a race. They are not two chocolate cakes. Because decisions about what ingredients to use, what recipe to use, and whether or not to make a cake at all have been made by the author, and then remade entirely by the translator. So, of course, you are not comparing like with like. What you’re saying is: this is why I desperately want so many other people to read this book. Longlists and shortlists allow a jury to say this about a range of books, then eventually and reluctantly and regretfully and sometimes tearfully they have to make the decision as to which of those books they want to save most of their enthusiasm for. But apart from the fact that there are words on paper, superficially, there is not a lot that connects Heaven and Elena Knows and A New Name and Tomb of Sand and The Books of Jacob. They are doing astonishingly different things."