Gone to the Forest - Katie Kitamura

"Set on a struggling farm in a fiercely beautiful colonial country teetering on the brink of civil war, this second novel by one of literature’s rising young stars weaves a brilliant tale of family drama and political turmoil. Since his mother’s death ten years earlier, Tom and his father have fashioned a strained peace on their family farm. Everything is frozen under the old man’s vicious, relentless control—even, Tom soon discovers, his own future. When a young woman named Carine enters their lives, the complex triangle of intrigue and affections escalates the tension between the two men to the breaking point. After a catastrophic volcanic eruption ignites the nation’s smouldering discontent into open revolution, Tom, his father, and Carine find themselves questioning their loyalties to one another and their determination to salvage their way of life."


Kitamura's deceptively simple prose draws the reader into her tale of colossal colonial and personal collapse and keeps one spellbound to the end. The cast of characters runs from an infuriatingly cold and hostile land owner, to his ignorant and naïve son, to a victimized and victimizing young woman -- each of them unlikable, each at times sympathetic. Each unwitting participants in the undoing of the world as they know it. The land buckles, social order is breached, and the main characters march (or stumble)on at a time when just doing what one always did is no longer sufficient. Of course there is a price to be paid for such stubbornness, and Kitamura describes it with affecting, stark language that had me alternately holding my breath and rushing forward in the text unable to read quickly enough.

This is not a gentle book. There's no nostalgia here for the colonial era or its discontents. Interestingly, the story focuses not on the country's "natives" but on the colonizers who are in the process of being ousted. It's an uncomfortable focus--not a bad one, but a challenging one, since inevitably the readers' sympathies end up painfully divided.

I thought Kitamura's decision to use an anonymous, generic country was a good idea as it allows everyone with a country with a colonial past to draw from their own experiences. The only things we know about the country in question is that it has a mild, probably equatorial, climate; plenty of rich agricultural land; volcanoes; and that dorado (mahi-mahi) live in its rivers. The term "dorado" is Spanish, which suggests that there's some Spanish influence--but that leaves plenty of territory wide open.
I personally enjoyed the brutal and very open ended ending. It leaves Tom and a heavily pregnant Carine cowering behind a tree as a large group of rebels approach. It is implied that they will be killed within moments. While I understand that this type of ending will not appeal to everyone as it has no real resolution or character growth I thought it fit the tone of the story very well. In real life, the world doesn't swerve just because you are experiencing you own story and sometimes people don't change. 

Overall a really stellar book. Some of the most exquisitely haunting language I have read in a long time. Short read that really packs a punch. I would highly recommend it with the proviso that it is an acquired taste. 

Age Rating 16+. A brutal rape scene of Carine by a large group of land owners. The descriptions of the massacres committed by the rebels are also vividly depicted.