I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
Everything that begins will eventually end. There’s no doubt about it. An unavoidable dichotomy of our life: the moment we are born, we are doomed to die. A sweet gift from the very nature of our life.
Life and death. Black and white. Love and hate. Reality and dreams. Self and the Other. How to distinguish them? And where does this unfathomable, blurred border between me and the other, real and imaginary lie?
These are the questions we can’t help but ask when reading I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid.
It all starts simple: a couple in the car, going to visit his parents. A perfect huis clos* with deep and meaningful dialogues mingled with the narrator’s thoughts and memories.
The narrator, this untrustworthy I who tells us the story, is a girl. And the first thing we learn about her is that she is thinking of ending things. Beginnings and endings. Day and night. Self and the Other.
Short sentences and lots of dialogues that’s what we get at first. The marching pace of the story tricks us into believing that it will be all simple. Just another love story. Or, probably, a road novel?
The hope for a safe ride shatters into a thousand pieces when the untrustworthy I tells us about a mysterious caller. The one who breathes on the phone and disrupts the peaceful sleepy routine.
The menacing unknown creeps into the story. Just like in our recurring dreams – or nightmares? – we find ourselves looking through a peephole and seeing that faceless black figure that stares at us. Panic and petrifying cold fear grip us.
What is this story about? And why the heck is it interrupted every now and then by some alien dialogues that don’t belong to it? Short conversations that promise us a not-happy bloody ending?
The deeper we dive into the story, the more questions we ask ourselves. Its illusionary simplicity and even naivety fade out with every page we turn. The more and more disturbing and surreal details weave into the plot that rips off its mask when the snowstorm starts and erases all the borders between real and surreal. Everyone is lost, and we, readers, are trapped.
What is this book?
What is happening?
And who is the narrating I?
Iain Reid’s debut novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an uncomfortable read. Lulled by its simple prose, we wake up in the middle of the book, realizing that instead of going to a family dinner, we are traveling to the deepest layers of the troubled and ill-balanced mind.
And yet it is a brilliant book. Because it all starts simple. And ends with questions that will haunt us for a long time afterward.
(c) Aleksandra Aubay
*Huis clos is a French expression used to describe a novel, a play, or a movie where the action takes place in one and the same place, and its characters can’t escape from it.
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