I stumbled upon this book long before the abhorrant and appalling events in Kazan and Perm. Åsne Seierstad has written an atrocious story about the massacre in 2011 of 69 boys and girls in a summer camp, and eight adults after a bomb attack in Oslo. It is a ghastly story about a gruesome murderer who had tremendous problems with his family, who suffered from professional and sexual failure and experienced grotesque narcissism.
The story begins with the monosyllabic sentence “She ran.” which has already horrified me.The value of this book lies in the fact that the author was able to collect authentic reliable material that the reader will meet in the book (the killer’s diaries, his thoughts, his statements, interviews with eyewitnesses and victims who were able to survive after the terrorist act).
I want to try to understand what drives these horrible people to these disgusting actions. Surely they are mentally ill, and more often these mental problems come from the family.
Some vocabulary items that caught my attention:
- To abhor- to hate something, for example a way of behaving or thinking, especially for moral reasons
- To be racked by/with sth- to make somebody suffer great physical or mental pain
- To recur- to happen again or a number of times
