Babel

I lost touch with literary tragedy ever since I left junior college and put down albert camus' the plague. Babel re-established that touch while at the same time reproduced the entire notion of tragedy. Far from hyperbolically cardboard characters, dramatic scenes and grandiloquent abstractions, far even, from tears itself, the very original and staple expression of tragedy, it had 4 very realistic stories that intertwined but were each exceptional in their difficult moments.

Difficult moments there were. As a woman and her two charges stumbled in the inky darkness of a desert with nothing but a prick of torchlight illuminating their way I felt such overwhelming despair I closed my eyes and shuddered, and this was one of those few times I felt such immense relief with a positive resolution, the likes of which I would have found obscene in other contexts with all their usual improbability.