Book 33 - Alex Garland "The Coma"

Alex Garland "The Coma" (Faber & Faber)





The Coma has a simple premise: while commuting home late one night, a man named Carl tries to protect a woman from thugs on an underground train somewhere in London and finds himself brutally assaulted. After being released from hospital he realises that something is wrong: his life is disjointed, impossible things are happening, and he seems to be hallucinating. He soon realises that he never left the hospital at all, and that he is trapped in a coma. Realising that he must be the instrument of his own salvation, he sets about exploring the dreamscape in an effort to wake up.

Clocking in at around two hundred pages (this is one of the first books I've read in ages that doesn't number its pages; I got the count off Amazon), many of which are white space of woodcut illustrations made by garland's father, The Coma is a quick and easy read. It had to be, of course - an exploration of one's mental landscape, with all the metaphors and weirdness required, would be far too tedious to cover a whole novel. As it stands, Garland manages the description quite well, and The Coma never feels like a chore to read - although novellas rarely do.

It does work quite well as a story, with a few glimpses of figures in Carl's hospital room making intriguing statements providing mystery, plus the simple desire to find out whether or not he successfully wakes up. There's also an unsettling sense of eerie alienation, with a few genuinely disturbing scenes; this is a book that could very easily be adapted into a horror film

Book 34 - Ethan Coen "Fargo"

Ethan Coen "Fargo" (Faber & Faber)





This is the screenplay of the film by the Coen brothers.

Jerry, a car seller, is full of debts, and thus goes to Fargo to hire two men to abduct his wife.
The scheme concocted , simple and without problems, consists in asking for a lucrative ransom from her rich father.

But soon after the abduction, the two men who have warrants out for them rea stopped by a police patrolman and they kill him.

Jerry, complicit in this deception, starts to be the target of suspicion when he speaks of redemption to the father, who wants to deliver the money himself. The case is being conducted by the chief of police, addicted to endless cups of coffee and in an advance state of pregnancy, endeavours to catch the criminals and save the wife of Jerry.