The Offence

If our bodies are the frontier between us and the world, how much pain can a man withstand before he makes the transition? Can love save someone without hope? These are some of the questions that are implicit in the story of Kurt Crüwell, a young German tailor who, at the outbreak of the Second World War, becomes a witness to a time with a true talent for horror. Kurt, prey to the chaotic events of his age, is about to lose his sensibility. Metaphor for a tragic century, Kurt’s life is transformed into a terrible journey to the roots of evil, symbolised in this novel with the world vision of Nazism. But the story is also a moving portrait of the capacity for love to overcome pain in the world and an original reflection of the grandeur and misery of the human body. In this book, the author consolidates an enormously successful trajectory as a novelist, creating a work that brims with a language that is both precise and poetic. The novel arrives at an unexpected conclusion, which demonstrates the limits between fiction and reality, dreams and consciousness, literature and life.