On the Edge

On the Edge

Rating

8.5

The Pequod Review:

On the Edge is one of the best fictional accounts of the 2008 financial crisis, an intense and unsettling drama set in Spain and told from the perspective of an aging carpenter whose family business is on the brink of financial ruin. Chirbes is a fine and perceptive writer:

In day-to-day living, you’re constrained by your kids, by your wife; if it wasn’t for them, you’d do all kinds of crazy things, but when you’re in really deep trouble, when you reach that final tipping point, the very opposite happens: it is precisely your wife and kids who make you do the crazy thing that, before, they seemed to be stopping you from doing.

[...]

Do you see how commercial obligations bind people more closely than love?

[...]

If money serves any purpose at all, at least it buys innocence for your descendants. Which is no small thing. It removes you from the animal kingdom and places you in the moral kingdom. It humanizes you.

Recommended.