The Less Said

the less said

In The Less Said, readers dive into the obsessive, pessimistic, darkly comic mind of the 60ish narrator, P—. He’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer (cansha, he calls it, to blunt its force) and decides, along with his wife and college-age son, that a final celebration of life is in order. Over a single weekend, friends and family travel to a tropical destination to fete P— one last time. The wrinkle: P—, wanting to avoid the rigamarole of a messy, drawn-out death, has hired a killer to dispatch him over the weekend, the where and when unknown. Against this backdrop, P— compulsively records random memories from his life into a voice recorder, a request from his son.
What emerges is an end-of-life story that deftly balances the play of irony and a heartbreaking humanity.