Reviews and Recommendations

Sulphuric Acid by Amélie Nothomb (translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside)

Reviewed by Hester Casey

This is a short book - a mere 127 pages - so no space for wasted words. By the middle of page 1, Pannonique has been snatched from her stroll in the Jardin des Plantes and packed into a lorry by the "Organisers". Re-labelled CKZ 114, she is just one of the latest - and perilously disposable - batch to feed the ultimate reality TV show, Concentration.

The show targets a viewing audience jaded by reality TV and thirsty for blood. Based on the idea of a Nazi concentration camp, the prisoners are controlled by a team of brutal young recruits - kapos. For the first time in her twenty years, Kapo Zdena has purpose and direction. She loves the military styling of her title and relishes the 500 seconds of undiluted fame her introduction to the programme gives her and uses it to maximise her appeal to an audience - who react with contempt.

Immediately conscious of the dangers of appealing to the cameras, CKZ 114 resolves to avoid doing anything that makes her telegenic. However the camera quickly hones in on the qualities of stillness, beauty and dignity that glow from prisoner CKZ 114, despite the near-starvation and degradation she experiences along with the other prisoners. Everybody wants to know her name: the viewers; the other prisoners; and - dangerously - Kapo Zdena. It becomes one of the few bargaining chips CKZ 114 possesses.

The book has resonances with Celebrity Big Brother's Jade Goody versus Shilpa Shetty - camera-fodder, sacrificed for programme ratings: Shetty to racist bullying; Goody to the scorn of British middle-class.

There is a sense of voyeurism as a reader turning page after page; a sense of being the appalled observer in the same way as the viewers who cannot resist tuning in to Concentration, whether delighted or disgusted by the programme as we wait to see (or actively vote for) the next prisoner executed.

Of course this would never happen in the real world, would it? However, with reality TV ratings dropping off all over the world, who knows…
 
 

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