Volt
After a worldwide fire and the collapse of neoliberalism, the financial elite has withdrawn to a tropical island off the coast of South Africa. There they continue their affluent lives while the soil shrivels up beneath the unforgiving sun, ocean levels rise and the indigenous population is oppressed, terrorised and massacred. It’s a place under constant pressure, where extreme violence has become the order of the day and distrust permeates every aspect of life.
Duvall is the chief of the secret service: he determines the fate of newcomers and makes short work of dissident voices. He hunts insurgent ‘natives’ for sport. He governs the island together with Victor, an eccentric scientist whose dubious experiments are not unlike those of Josef Mengele.
A book that is by turns spine-chilling and seductive, a work of malicious beauty. ‘Volt’ proves that Six is a literary wizard.Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer
With surgical precision, imaginative language and a brooding atmosphere, Six leads his floundering characters to the abyss. The novel grows into a mesmerising trip in which hallucinations, delusions, dreams and phantoms from the dark recesses of this world get the upper hand. ‘Volt’ is dystopian and reverberates with echoes from classics such as George Orwell’s ‘1984’, Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’.
Six’s descriptions are peerless: he depicts powerful scenes with clinical precision, much like a miniaturist or a film director. ****De Standaard
