Called by many an 'erotic' novel, I don't feel it is sexy. The family's young son in the story is said to be 'innocent,' yet he is an expert seducer at a young age. The father of the family spends an hour each night in the bathroom taking care of his aging body, and here again everything is not as it seems. Some say the novel is 'wickedly funny,' yet I never laughed.
Is this book about a boy's precocious sexuality or about something else? What is this lively small novel really about? We'll never know, because the author never quite tells us.
Wait a minute! I have changed my mind about this book. The boy is pictured on the front cover as a baby, but what if he is really 15 or 16 years old, as indicated by the fact that his father will be giving him a motorcycle on his next birthday? That would change things. That would put an entirely different slant on the boy's presumed "innocence."
The author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. He is mainly known for political and journalistic works.
