Euphoria

Heinz Helle Five old schoolfriends trek through the wintry landscape of the Alps but this is no happy reunion or jolly holiday. It is the aftermath of some apocalyptic event, with their path taking in burnt-out cars, dead bodies and a general sense of desolation. In short chapters that feel like a series of bleak, brutal prose poems, Helle’s writing (and Kari Driscoll’s translation of it) creates a vivid, troubling and distinctly disturbing sense of quiet desperation.

The narrator slides between flashback reveries of the world he’s lost and the savage lifestyle of primal instinct he now inhabits. This grim eschatology makes for a dark and uneasy struggle to survive, and at just over 200 pages it is short enough that, like the human race, it is over before you really notice. 8/10