Iida Rauma’s third novel succeeds at the impossible. The furious urge to remember, a love for the marvelous history of a burned and demolished city as well as pain that strikes at the core are woven into a stunning tableau of violence, its rings spreading out to the ends of the earth. Destruction demonstrates the ability of literature to tell the truth when all other ways of speaking have been denied or condemned as lunacy.
While jogging at night, A sees a familiar figure at the city’s desolate fringes and realizes nothing ends, nothing is over. So begins a breathless, desperate attempt to hunt down and escape the past across the ravaged city of Turku, into the water-damaged classrooms of the 1990s and a darkness for which there are no words but still must be expressed. Destruction asks how one can write about oneself if one’s own self has been shattered. How can we document the horrors of one’s childhood in a culture where adults hate children and want to erase the traces of past wrongs?
