Senseless [Paperback]

Imagine you are walking home, on a fall evening and suddenly someone pulls a pillow case over your head, pushes you in a car and the next thing you see is that your being held captive in a "not so noticeable" apartment, in a isolated corner of the city where escaping is not a possibility.
This book is about Eliott Gast, who is an American economist and is kidnapped in Brussels, by a radical group that opposed globization.
Eliott is a middle-aged Princeton grad, and an economist who spends half of his life in Brussels, where he plays the role of a matchmaker introducing American and European markets.
Eliott is a man of senses. He enjoys tasting variety of cusines, has appreciation for music and has been around a lot. And now all this is going to end. Gradually his senses will be taken away from him. And this process of his senses being mutilated is being broadcasted on the internet.
This is a very intriguing book. It focuses more on his being trapped than him trying to escape. While Eliott is trapped in the apartment. His mind is racing with thoughts focusing on all his wrong doings. This part is very interesting because the Eliott goes back and forth in his life, creating new setting each time. This makes the book hard not to read.
This is a very intresting book;it's the book that you find hard to read as well hard not to red. One page and its guaranteed you will get hooked on to it.

Elliot Gast is a man of taste and refinement. He has a nose for a fine wine, and eye for fine detail and a palate that has appreciated the best of food. He works for a company called IBIS as a social facilitator in business dealings, having moved on from being a small cog in some murky palm-greasing on behalf of American business interests at the point of the formation of Europe's Common Market.

His life is good.

On the way home from a splendid meal one evening, he is kidnapped from the streets of Brussels.

Initially, the kidnappers have a civilised approach to their guest, treating him with a modicum of respect.

Luckily Gast is a pretty cool customer. He's been in hostage situations before. He's been trained for such eventualities. He thinks he'll be able to hang on till the necessary formalities for his release are completed.

Unfortunately, he's not in the hands of any typical captors.
He finds himself accused, a little in the manner of Josef K, of being guilty of something by a group of people who are part of a bigger organisation that is `diverse by nature' and with `many controls and safeguards'.

There's to be a punishment, and what better punishment could there be for a man like Gast than to remove his 5 senses?

To gain support for their cause, the kidnappers are showing the entire event online. The general public are to vote on Gast's future and to donate to buy his freedom or otherwise.

The situation is a complete nightmare.

The journey through it is told by Gast in a generally dispassionate way. He reflects on his past, the events that have taken him to such a point in life, and upon the present as he tries to figure things out. The stories are formed in such a way as to amplify the miseries of his predicament.

The premise of the book is superb, but a good idea in itself isn't enough. To my delight, Stona Fitch works with the concept wonderfully well. The detail, the similes, the tales recounted from Gast's past create a vivid experience and in doing so heightens the horror when it comes to the removal of his ways of interpreting the world.

I've seen mentions here and there of it being Kafkaesque and it's easy to see why. What comes to mind when I think of Kafka is a dispassionate description of terrible situations, life turning on a moment, bureaucratic mess, individual guilt, alienation and the horrors that go hand-in-hand with it. There are elements of each throughout Senseless.

What's more, the book was published way back in 2001. I guess that makes Stona Fitch a kind of visionary who'd seen early on the complex range of issues presented by globalisation, by reality TV and by the opportunities offered to anyone of enhanced methods of communication and our inevitable dependence upon them.

I also think that it's a testament to the quality of his writing that there were points where I had to look away from the page. The anticipation of what was coming was quite overwhelming. Now, it's not because I'm squeamish when it comes to violence and difficulty in fiction - I'd say the opposite was true - but when it's done this well I do get goose-bumps, not just because of the acts buy because of the implications of them. Within the small pictures he shows us the whole world and in the world he shows us the miniature.

It's a seriously good book and it deserves to be read, and it's great value as there's the `bonus track' in that I know I'll be thinking about it for a long time to come.

Senseless is best described as a psychological thriller, a novel that blends crime and horror, harking back through Christie's And Then There Were None, back through the Sherlock Holmes stories, right back to Edgar Allan Poe, the guy who brought the detective story genre kicking and screaming into the world with his Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841.

But I digress. Senseless is the brutally short tale of US economist Eliott Gast, abducted from the streets of Brussels by an anti-globalisation group.

The group strips Eliot of each of his five senses one by one, and broadcasts his torture over the internet as an example of the wages of capitalist sin.

The twist is that Eliot's release depends on the votes of those watching. Will the unwashed, ignorant millions vote for his release, or for another of his senses to be stripped away?

This novel pitches you right into Eliot's situation and forces you to ask the sort of questions you'd be asking if you were him. Could you really stand to live without any one of your five senses? If you had to choose, which one would you sacrifice? And if you had to sacrifice two of them? Or how about if you had to choose which one you'd want to be left with? Could you do it?

Fitch's descriptive prose, minimal yet rich, adds to the mundane atmosphere, making the events seem all the more horrific.

In terms of sheer visceral impact, this is one of the best novels I've ever read. I devoured it on a train ride from Edinburgh to Peterborough, and let me tell you, that was one of the most uncomfortable train journeys I've ever had, all because of how much I was squirming while reading this book. If you think you can take it, I urge you to read it to.