Burdened with noble goals, five young Frenchmen embark on a journey to deliver humanitarian aid to the Kakani region in Bosnia, during the period of civil war, but what began as a dangerous humanitarian mission on a bumpy road in the snow and cold, took a different path that made all their assumptions subject to question and skepticism. What's really in the boxes? Where are they going? What awaits them there on the other end? In addition to having to cross real checkpoints, they will also face more difficult intellectual barriers. What do the victims really need: survival or victory? What must be found: the animal survival instinct that requires only food and housing, or the human sense of dignity that requires means of resistance?
In an interesting and well-paced plot, the French writer Jean-Christophe Ruffin raises very profound questions about humanitarian work: its feasibility, its motives, and how to be truly humanitarian to the fullest extent. These are questions that the novel's characters keep asking themselves, and to each other, throughout a dangerous journey that may change their convictions, and perhaps their destinies, forever.
We must contemplate the secret of Homeric creativity in the epic narrative. So Homer does not care about telling only what happened in his epic “The Iliad,” but he is more interested in presenting the context of what happened and depicting the world in which this event occurred. We find events covering the universe from above Mount Olympus - the snowy sky - to the depths of the raging sea and the burning forests, and even the depths of the human soul itself in all its conditions, whether good or bad.
The events also cover gods, humans, the animal kingdom and birds. So we are dealing with a depiction of a universal existential situation, not a passing individual event. We are faced with an integrated system in which all the features and various components of living things and things interact, so that in the end we obtain a poetic exploration of the universe and its working system.
