Burdened with noble goals, five young Frenchmen embark on a journey to deliver humanitarian aid to the Kakani region in Bosnia, during the period of civil war, but what began as a dangerous humanitarian mission on a bumpy road in the snow and cold, took a different path that made all their assumptions subject to question and skepticism. What's really in the boxes? Where are they going? What awaits them there on the other end? In addition to having to cross real checkpoints, they will also face more difficult intellectual barriers. What do the victims really need: survival or victory? What must be found: the animal survival instinct that requires only food and housing, or the human sense of dignity that requires means of resistance?
In an interesting and well-paced plot, the French writer Jean-Christophe Ruffin raises very profound questions about humanitarian work: its feasibility, its motives, and how to be truly humanitarian to the fullest extent. These are questions that the novel's characters keep asking themselves, and to each other, throughout a dangerous journey that may change their convictions, and perhaps their destinies, forever.
Remembering his childhood, Miguel tells of a wooden statue the size of a man, carved by a musical instrument maker before his death, so the people of Itape decided to place it at the top of the hill, so that it would become a landmark of the village. Massive events and wars take place, and the novel branches out to narrate the events of two decades of Paraguayan history, before returning to that hill with its steadfast statue, which has become very symbolic.
Rua Bastos shows history from the perspective of ordinary people, poignantly depicting their attempts to rebel against authority, revealing the brutality of the ironies of history when these people are forced to kill and die in senseless wars that they fight while standing with the very authority against which they rebel.
Using a linear sequence in narrating the events of his novel, and painting a huge mural about Paraguay, Rua Bastos writes, in a tight plot, his novel, which the great Argentine writer Borges said was one of America’s best novels...
A land surveyor sent by an unknown person for some unknown purpose to the castle. The castle itself is an unknown place. It is not clear what he is supposed to accomplish there.
The novel follows his repeated attempts to accomplish his work. However, he cannot move beyond the ghostly surroundings of the castle.
He is never allowed to enter the castle. He also cannot return to his home. He is left alone as he faces the dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, in his never-ending struggle as he moves from one maze to another.
