The Ballad of Purple K by Blandine Le Callet Review

Lila is located in a closed, semi-dark room. They usually dawns in front of himself. They have been sedated. But the firm, aching straps on the wrists, with which it is strapped to the bed, she feels clear. Monitors monitor their bodily functions. A camera watching them around the clock. Since they bear no light, dark glasses to protect their eyes. The disgusting food, which one are you to eat, they can not choke down; therefore she is fed through a tube that runs through her nose.

Soothing music they showered – it should give “the whole an air of humanity”

If you have Purple illness admitted to a real psychiatry.? Or Purple prisoners of a psychopath? Is Blandine le callets ” La Ballade de Lila K < " Blandine Le Callet:" La Ballade de Lila K "in" / p >

Lilas fate wears a scary future in Paris. She was born on October 19, 2089 in “Gringny Hospital, 5th district extra muros” in the “zone”. The father is unknown, the mother lives neglected, prostitution goes.

Lila can not remember them later barely; but the moment to enter as “men dressed in black with helmets” the front door, enter the room, tugging the mother from the bed and dissipate in a straitjacket, it tracks into their adult dreams of all sedatives notwithstanding.

Shortly after her sixth birthday is received in the state “Central Home” Purple. This is on the> right

Purple makes it their educators not easy. Her past, searching for their roots, to the whereabouts of the mother, who was deprived of custody, and get some of their own personality to her strong will speak in the eyes of authority against them. But when she is eighteen, the above-average intelligent girl can convince the Commission with an excellent audit and must leave the home after years of total control. It relates an apartment, but can not study despite the best conditions, but must accept its assigned simple work as Datenerfasserin in the “Great Library”.

Again, it does not escape the control authorities, has in her small work cell but after all calm before crowds and noise – both she feels remains as distressing -; it can creep into books and has access to archives. The filing her mother stay while unavailable to them, but an employee who is attracted to Lila, you can get the documents secret.

There are gloomy visions that put forward by the author, and she draws on concepts and motives behind the literary from several and cinematic dystopias are familiar, especially the strict physical separation between the residential areas for the ruling class and the slums of the oppressed masses.

Le Callet creates an authoritarian society in which up in the genital area regulated the lives of citizens and is strictly monitored. Particularly great importance attaches to rigid hygiene regulations. The Wohlständler treat yourself to cosmetic surgery and keep malaise as a result of genetic defects through early abortions at bay. The people on the other side of the separation wall on the other hand it leaves their fate; they brutalized in misery, suffering from microbes, aging fast, go in the dirt to the dogs and killing each other in their desperate struggle for survival. Criminal gangs feuding each other in civil strife.

The technical development is used alone for the benefit of the elites and to ensure the status quo. However, the author is not only uninspired, in this respect, but already out of date. As if it would take a hundred years yet implants for contraception! As if you still expensive helicopters would be flying over a city – where but already has a network of surveillance cameras across London under control, any mobile phone user can be tracked and recognize intelligence via satellite or drone, which newspaper a suspect just somewhere in the Orient reads … downright cute affects the idea of ​​automated urinalysis in which a built-in toilet apparatus takes the Pröbchen and analyzed and forwards its findings equal to a physician. And if may be read by 2100 books because of the risk of contamination with protective gloves, then what is become great from the microfilms, ebook readers and the vast digital libraries Internet companies and scientific institutions that we use today? Over the next hundred years, the world is unimaginable extensively modify – incomparably more radical than from 1913 to 2013 – but at Blandine Le Callet she stops technically

Clear: The dangers of a crippling society are not Le Callet. Issue; to black and white tableau it is designed for simple, painted to surface. It serves only as a backdrop for her protagonist, who was born on the wrong side of the system and manages to fend for themselves over to the ‘right’, where they can enjoy a customized, workable, but severely traumatized women the benefits of high security apparatus. Their development is individual and without affecting other or the system.

The voltage reading results from Lilas search for her mother, for explanations, for a debt that is hidden somewhere in the past. Why do they bury themselves away today most like in a closet? Why did she terrified of touch? At the same time she is aware of all buried inside her feelings from her childhood – affection and care of their mother, they mustered despite widrigster circumstances; Odors (such as from a can of cat food) cause that still cravings; the desire for security, for warmth and feeling.

Purple is a fighter for their better life on the other side. It must not only at the mercy of Almighty surveillance state evade, suppress their aversion to the gentlemen of the Commission, sent assume the role envisaged and give pleasing, but also their own fears overcome, learn to speak, dare among men. As it stands in its interior, it must disclose anyone. In her dance on the high wire over a volcanic crater it can always crash, except that it is even inadvertently, be it that an anonymous speaks an opinion on them.

At the end of the novel she finds the protective cocoon in which they finally it is itself: “[I] I’ll put me in the closet, where I see nobody or can reach … I will not be afraid.”