Nothing truly disturbed me; a group of seventh graders in Denmark decide to create their own “heap of meaning” after one of their classmates, Pierre Anthon, climbs up into a plum tree and refuses to come down. His refrain to anyone who comes near him is that life has no meaning, and his classmates are determined to prove him wrong.
What is disturbing is how they go about proving that life has meaning; each classmate has to give up something of great personal meaning to him or her, and it comes to pass that the previous classmate who gave up something determines what the next classmate gives up. Wickedness and revenge begin to surface, resulting in some utterly appalling behaviors from the classmates—but the strangest part is that no one, until the very end, sees anything wrong enough with the “plan” to stop it. And even then, these children are so enmeshed in their “meaning” that they begin to believe it does have meaning, even if they cannot truly understand it.
The book jacket states that Nothing is a twenty-first century Lord of the Flies experience, and that is exactly what I envisioned as I turned to the last page. The novel left me deeply unsettled, and while it may not be the best or most uplifting novel I’ve read, any novel that affects me emotionally is definitely worth the time it took to read.
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