Sufferance

Guernica World Editions ()

9781771838856

212 pages | May 1, 2024

When so much has been said about the Holocaust, a novel that provides a new perspective is to be welcomed. In Sufferance, Charles Palliser has made that terrible event horrifying but also universalised it and by doing so suggested that it could happen again in any country. The novel conveys the psychological claustrophobia of a family and its unwelcome guest as the murderous trap closes on them, tearing the family apart even as it faces the approaching terror.

Disturbing and distressing—but in the best possible way. Times like these call for strong medicine. The narrator reminded me very much of the old adage about the frog in a pot with the temperature being raised in very tiny, gradual increments—never becoming aware of the danger until it is too late. This is a small book that packs a big punch—I am grateful to have read it. People everywhere need to do so, and especially in the places where self-reflection is least encouraged and most desperately required.

Sufferance is an important novel. Powerful … brilliant … vivid … It's an honest and unflinching encounter with the darkness that ever threatens the whole bloody human endeavor everywhere. Even now. Especially now. … At the end … tears blurred my page.

Valerie Martin, author of PROPERTY which won the 2003 Orange Prize (now The Women's Prize for Fiction)

When we think of the Holocaust, or indeed, any genocide, there is often the question of complicity: how does a person living among it allow everything to happen without resistance? What delusions and lies do they tell themselves to make the indefensible possible? Charles Palliser's Sufferance begins with a disquieting elegance and ends on a note so chilling, I could hardly sleep. His unnamed narrator tries to tell his story as dispassionately as possible, and yet Palliser's brilliance is in revealing his casual antisemitism and misogyny subtly enough to render the reader unsure of where the story is going. Like a combination of Holocaust survivor Aharon Applefeld's Badenheim 1939, and Orwell's 1984, with a touch of the darkness of Cynthia Ozick, Sufferance is exceptional, and a must read at times like these.

Danila Botha, author of THINGS THAT CAUSE INAPPROPRIATE HAPPINESS

Sufferance is compulsive reading. It is shocking, gripping. The key is the narrator, the reader’s own shadow, and a man who turns out to be unreliable. He is weak and clings to an ambition that becomes daily more unrealistic. This is a story that floats in Everywhere/Nowhere territory, with a few locational clues but ultimately universal—a parable for our times, a cautioning horror story, like the frog in the slow boiler, unaware until its final moments.

Amanda Hale, author of MAD HATTER

Disturbing and distressing—but in the best possible way. Times like these call for strong medicine. The narrator reminded me very much of the old adage about the frog in a pot with the temperature being raised in very tiny, gradual increments—never becoming aware of the danger until it is too late. This is a small book that packs a big punch—I am grateful to have read it. People everywhere need to do so, and especially in the places where self-reflection is least encouraged and most desperately required.

Brian M. Levine, THE GLENN GOULD FOUNDATION

When so much has been said about the Holocaust, a novel that provides a new perspective is to be welcomed. In Sufferance, Charles Palliser has made that terrible event horrifying but also universalised it and by doing so suggested that it could happen again in any country. The novel conveys the psychological claustrophobia of a family and its unwelcome guest as the murderous trap closes on them, tearing the family apart even as it faces the approaching terror.

Carol Lee, author of CROOKED ANGELS