In the darkroom by Susan Faludi

Book set in Budapest, Hungary. Reread on 2020/07: https://www.instagram.com/p/CDFWK6NA0b8/

Reviewed on 2019/05: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxciWgUgZOQ/

I might need to take a break because I think this book has broken me. What is the purpose of all this that inflict on each other knowingly? We don’t learn anything whatsoever. We don’t want to. I want to be courageous and strong and ask a million #questions just like #faludidoes but I can’t. I completely sympathized with her compulsive and assiduous research/academic chapters. Because I literally do the same thing. Isn’t that the reason why I’ve been reading so voraciously for the past two years? I’m hoping at some point a book is going to teach me a lesson, a writer from the past from whom to learn, a roadmap to something we can do differently. #susanfaludi reads and investigates to answer her own questions but in turn these multiply into even more and more questions, endless and relentless questions. The worst part is when her existentialist questioning becomes an inquisition onto the silences her closest people have chosen for themselves. Faludi realizes that in order to hope through her quest to know, her inquiry she inevitably has to hurt those she loves because they have become a part of the endless cycle of anger and fear. Well at some point, they had to make that only binary choice Faludi describes: life or death. Silences and cycles provide “life” and questioning brings death. This is the exact conundrum so masterfully exposed by Imre #Kertesz in Fateless which I think is one of the best books of all times. That scene with them hesitatingly dancing to Michael Jackson at the “Tranny” dance party while one homophobic, neonazi and anti-semitic attack after another keeps happening all over the “new” far-right-wing #hungary (also madly in love with the same extremists in Israel!) will forever be in my mind. Is that our inevitable future? #inthedarkroom#americanliterature #pulitzer#holocaust #shoah #fuckorban#fuckneonazis #transgenderdad#identities #hungarianjews #memoir#budapest #genderqueerlit#highlyrecommended