Book of the Week: RUINS, CHILD by Giada Scodellaro
“The writing in Giada Scodellaro’s debut novel Ruins, Child is difficult to define and grasp onto. Like the comma in its title, the novel is constantly spliced, refracted: a group of people are crowding around to watch the same film they always watch, a film of themselves and their elders; now the beauty of crumbling buildings is being assessed by a floating, undefined voice; now we’re hearing about Stevie Wonder’s The Secret Life of Plants. With a book as free-flowing and unpredictable as a river, the experience of reading Ruins, Child is that of sitting on the banks and watching the water flow. Ruins, Child won Scodellaro the 2024 Novel Prize, though it hardly fits the category of ‘novel’; Scodellaro evades all the trappings of novel-writing by writing something that borrows as much from music and improvisation as it does from experimental film or even literary greats like The Waves by Virginia Woolf. In Ruins, Child, no word is frivolous; everything is exact and exactly as Scodellaro wants it to be, even if on first read it’s baffling or oblique. That’s not to say that the reading experience is difficult; rather, it’s refreshing to read something that refuses to unfurl itself upon first touch.” —Jemima Skala