When it’s all in the mind
THE novel opens with a quotation from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: ‘the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’
This sets the tone for the chilling opening chapter, in which a woman invites someone into her home, with devastating consequences. The complex personality of Virginia, the protagonist, (Topolski is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist) is riddled with contradictions — she was an unloved only child of a loveless marriage, and this has damaged her. We are presented with her subjective view during key moments in her childhood. She is plain while her mother is beautiful, exacerbating her piercing loneliness. Her one friend — from a warm and loving family — emigrates to Venezuela, leaving her with Ruby, who appears when it suits her and exercises a disturbing influence over Virginia.
