| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Trade in The Cave for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Plus, get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
New York Times
“ Krabbe’s carefully constructed narrative has a geometry so precise that the patterns buried under the surface emerge only in the final pages.”
Review
'Krabbe's carefully constructed narrative has a geometry so precise that the patterns buried under the surface emerge only in the final pages' New York Times 'Full of beautiful coincidences, epiphanies, turning points and roads not taken' Los Angeles Times
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A small novel from the Netherlands. A mystery novel with no mystery at all for the readers but only for the characters. A sad story too. Three fourteen year old kids in a summer camp in Belgium are going to sign up for their future in that one little summer month. One will end up a drug lord in the Netherlands. And the other two, due to their mediocrity and their lack of enterprising spirit will end up wanting what the drug lord can give them, money, when in their mid-life they will suddenly decide they have to become enterprising, and they will do what he asks them to do, pass drugs somewhere in a south-east Asian country. Pure accident, she travelling on a fake identity from the US, he travelling incognito from the Netherlands, having to pass a suitcase of heroin from one hired car to another, between two planes on an empty parking lot in the night. No real danger. Except that in this country living more or less under a dictator or at least a capricious hardly elected general known as General Suffering, which is funny in a Buddhist country since Suffering is the standard translation for Dukkha, the central concept of Buddhism, anything may happen. And anything happens. These two people who had not seen each other for thirty years, since they were fourteen, met, recognized each other but are imprudent in that recognition making them suspicious to some local tramps near by who join them once and for all in their entangled and intertwined guts. The rest is horror. The two tramps will vanish, into death and oblivion. An inoffensive one-legged kid will be accused, will confess and will be executed. And the drug will never surface anywhere. And who could care less or more? The book yet is sad because it ends with the husband and the two sons of the woman who never gets identified. These three men are mourning her, each one in their own ways, distant anyway. She just stepped out of their life and we wonder if she should ever have been in their life. That's sad because she was a good wife and a good mother, but she only left recollections that require her to be away to come back and be remembered. You have some people like that. They seem to be nothing but the instant when you meet them, day after day, without any time depth, past, nothing, and yet that past comes up when they have disappeared, a past that is in no real way emotional, just anecdotic. Sad indeed. That little book is sad.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Egon is a geologist, a meek, unassuming man coming to terms with a loveless marriage. As the novel opens, he is in Thailand, carrying thousands of dollars worth of heroin to an unknown contact. To understand how and why he is in this situation, we must journey back twenty years - to a far-off summer camp, when the young Egon met another boy his own age - the charismatic, utterly amoral Axel Van De Graaf - possessed of a terrible willpower that corrupts and poisons all who encounter it.
Krabbe's masterpiece - an unflinching examination of the damage human beings do to each other both by chance and design, a meditation on mortality and the one chance that is our lives, and a terrible portrayal of the human character in the twentieth century, free of both morality and God. An amazing, unforgettable book, and one of the best uses of an omniscient narrator there is. The book's obscurity seems to stand in inverse proportion to its power: start reading it and I guarantee you'll do nothing else until you reach the book's quietly shattering climax, and the secret of the cave.
Krabbe's masterpiece - an unflinching examination of the damage human beings do to each other both by chance and design, a meditation on mortality and the one chance that is our lives, and a terrible portrayal of the human character in the twentieth century, free of both morality and God. An amazing, unforgettable book, and one of the best uses of an omniscient narrator there is. The book's obscurity seems to stand in inverse proportion to its power: start reading it and I guarantee you'll do nothing else until you reach the book's quietly shattering climax, and the secret of the cave.
Format:Paperback
Axel is quite an interesting personality who exerts a strong (and damaging) influence over everyone he meets. And yes, the plot takes a few turns. Somehow, though, there wasn't enough to make a real impression - either at the time or on reflection a few weeks later.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Chilling
An incredible book. I loved Krabbe's the Rider and so I thought I'd give this a try and was astonished by its power. Read more
Published on 14 Jan 2010 by R. Sanger
Top book
What an awesome book - the best one I've read to date. It's just so well put together, completely flips flps on itself in the middle, and then ties everything together in the last... Read more
Published on 26 July 2003
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192198663_.gif){kind=small}
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
