[.ca] Sulphuric Acid (ISBN 0571234925)

Media Rage:
Amélite Nothomb's "Sulfuric Acid" is a short fictional account of a TV reality show called "Concentration" in which the production team keeps people imprisoned and under surveillance. Selected at random, subjects are moved to the TV sets to be beaten and humiliated to a pulp by other prisoners who play the role of Kapos with the goal of increasing audience rates. The title of the show means in two very different, yet bizarrely interrelated ways: on the one hand, it evokes the space of the concentration camp where the subjects dwell; on the other, it alludes in veiled manner to the perversly delicious concentration with which every week members of the audience vote from the comfort of their homes on the issue of whether or not to execute one of the prisoners. Ms. Nothomb's short tale routinely weds rage and media as one unit to create an inescapable level of reality in the New World Order of "Sulfuric Acid," which has succumbed, tragically, to the comforts of immediate (and ironically unmediated) gratification of visuality. In it, the prisoners' names and identities are gradually erased with the degradation of the beatings and humiliations as cameras capture every single step, to yield a number and another potential sacrificial lamb to be offered to the gods of media rage: voyeurism, virtuality, rat-racing, demoralization and the powerful immorality of the remote control. Satiric, realistic, somber, and deeply cynical, this book represents a step comparable to those taken by Graham Greene in the exploration of the novelist's experience, only this time Ms. Nothomb treads fearlessly the virtual reality of the most brutal rage that can be exposed in global mass media. This novel wildly satirizes the world of mass media in ways reminiscent of how Ray Bradbury's "Farenheit 451" spoke of the demise of the printed page and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" revisited reproductive health and rights, presenting readers with an eerie reality that is only logically possible in the plane of science fiction, while all along it promises that it can happen to you any day now. In more ways than one, this book is a virtual twin soul to Alejandro Amenábar's film "Tesis" in which the snuff film industry was exposed as a clear and present danger whose immediacy nobody could believe. This is Ms. Nothomb's twentieth novel, and she has published three more since 2005. Great, provocative read from this prolific young author. No comfy chair, for it. NOTE: The English translation by Faber comes out at the end of September 25; hence, this review is based on Sergi Pàmies's translation into Spanish published by the Barcelona publishing house Anagrama earlier this year.