Mayhem

Beautiful, fresh . . . Rausing, a well-known author and publisher in London, here turns our attention to dark machinations in her own family. Her story is told while the psychological force of the events is still raw, and the final toll on the survivors unknown. Mayhem is a work of Nordic noir. We have become used that form on television, yet in this book it returns to its literary origins: Ibsen would have recognized the human conditions, if not the material ones, that underpin the Rausing family disaster—[the] miasma of modern addiction. Yet in Rausing’s hands, there is no vulgarity: the effort becomes the will of philosophy to interrogate shame, to meet torment with reason. Like the roving eye in Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ we can do little else but scan the rooms for clues that might tell us why it happened. Rausing knows she must interrogate the pain from every angle, including the angles that discomfort her. Rausing has serenity, courage, and wisdom, and her book casts, on the reader, a spell. She has a gift for wielding paragraphs that will stay in the mind. [Written] with loving intelligence and care, Mayhem thinks its way through the madness, seeing it for what it is.