Book Review: Little Red Chairs

The Little Red Chairs, by Edna O'Brien

A foreigner, handsome and debonair, moves to small-town Ireland.

Now, Dr. Vlad is a bit strange, who portrays himself as a philosopher, a poet, and a sage. He seems eager to open the natives up to a new world. Soon -- to at least one lonely woman -- he becomes a companion and, eventually, a lover.

But then he is outed as a monster. For Dr. Vlad is not the refugee from Eastern Europe that he claims. He is not a victim but a war criminal, who led the torture and slaughter of thousands of his people.

None of the preceeding is a spoiler -- it's all there in the blurbs for the book. Indeed, the title relates to a piece of performance art that lined up 11,541 little red chairs to symbolize the 11,541 people who were killed in the Seige of Sarajevo in 1992. (Indeed, Dr. Vlad closely resembles Radovan Karadzic -- the Serbian president during the Bosnian war, who was convicted of war crimes.)

During his own war-crimes trial, there is this passage about Dr. Vlad and his delusions:

Sarajevo was his adopted city, the city he loved, and every shell that fell there hurt him personally, As he looked out towards his muted audience, he was like a man on the brink of his own creation.

This is quite a confounding book. On the one hand, it is lovely -- exquisitely written, capturing the voices of the meglomaniac and his enablers, along with the fears and dreams of the Irish villagers. O'Brien shows how hatred and division can be both universal and invisible. Despair and hope co-exist. Compassion, madness, and evil make their appearances.

But some parts literally make you cringe. She describes some brutally gruesome scenes of horror from both the past -- and the present -- as the result of Dr. Vlad's followers and henchmen. These descriptions are so explicit that I cannot imagine how she wrote them.

I do not think they are needed to provide one with the horror of the war and its atrocities, and including them make the book almost unreadable. Indeed, in two places, I saw what was coming and managed to skip over them.