The moment when life forks. The dilemmas imposed by simple chance, by destiny or by a God enchanted to repeat the scene of Abraham with that of his son Isaac, only with unpredictable variations of the ending. The point is that it seems as if existence moved in parallel plots from those moments in which what should have been ends up leading to what should never have been.
The question is knowing how to narrate it from the detail to the transcendence. Because each little story, in the thickest evolution of our world, ends up giving a complete answer to the most sophisticated ontological questions. And it is not that the argument goes through the branches of any philosophy. It is just a matter of discovering in those small essences the most complete meanings.
Year 1995. On a hot day in August, a family travels by truck to a clearing in the forest to collect firewood. The mother, Jenny, is in charge of cutting the small branches. Wade, the father, stacks them. Meanwhile, his two daughters, ages nine and six, drink lemonade, play games and sing songs. Suddenly, something terrible happens that will scatter the family in all directions.
Nine years later, Ann, Wade's second wife, is found sitting in the same truck. She can not stop imagining the terrible event, trying to understand why it happened, and she decides to undertake an urgent search to find the truth and thus recover the details of Wade's past, who has been showing signs of dementia for some time.
An exquisite prose novel told from different points of view, Idaho is an impressive debut about the power that redemption and love give us when it comes to living with the incomprehensible.
You can now buy Emily Ruskovic's "Idaho" here:
