This book is a post-apocalyptic fictional story. It is exciting and thought-provoking because it lacks everything, whether it is violence between survivors, threats from otherworldly forces or beings, or other assorted horrors, that the protagonists of such stories usually have to deal with. Because, with the exception of our only protagonist, who remains anonymous all along, in this story people are completely missing.
What is certain is that we are at least a decade or two after the end of the world (there was an epidemic far more deadly than the plague, severe armed conflicts, but also natural disasters due to global warming), and it seems very much that the last man to live is on Earth, a young girl who, after the death of the woman who found and raised her as a child, is left alone on a tiny island, among the ruins of a city that has perished and is sinking below the water level. Alone, but in relative prosperity and abundance, as there is a roof over her head, there is food and drinking water, and even most of it is protected from the rage of the natural elements.
Luckily, against the background of such a broad, yet carefully and credibly drawn background, Haslund-Gjerrild has chosen not to write a standard survival novel based on action elements, but one in which she can ask questions without hesitation and directly, such as what makes us human? What is the meaning of life and existence? Or can a person be interpreted merely on his own, without the others?
The girl, the only character in the book who no longer has any recollection of either the apocalypse or the former normal world, decides to leave her relatively safe but tiny island to explore a world she has never seen before (or at least the part that you can still reach on foot by pushing your shopping cart in front of you), which she knows only from the words and stories told by the woman raising her and becoming more and more empty and incomprehensible to her. However, on the mainland (or maybe just another, larger island) there is nothing but crumbling houses, rusty cars, discarded objects of use, the increasingly decaying mementos of human existence.
Haslund-Gjerrild is not primarily interested in the story, but in how the world is made up of words (from the words of the woman raising the girl, who also told her about things she could never see with her own eyes, so she couldn't really imagine or understand), and how the world can be described in words (how things that a girl has seen and never experienced before can be perceived in the absence of words), and how the human personality is distorted and almost vanished in the absence of feedback from other people.
Although the work of the Danish author is only 150 pages, it is still a very deep and meaningful book, in the first half of which the girl is wandering through the ruins of a destroyed human world, but in the second half she leaves human life behind her, in the absence of words there is nothing that is human.