Why read "Il trofeo" by Gaea Schoeters

"Il trofeo" by the Belgian author Gaea Schoeters – a screenwriter, journalist and librettist born in 1976 – is a novel that induces nightmares, distorts the human sense of right and wrong, and stirs ancestral instincts. It becomes an irresistible lure for the reader, who, spellbound, cannot put it down – just as irresistible is the lure that drives the protagonist, the businessman Hunter White, haunted by a name that is a destiny, who arrives in Africa to hunt an elderly rhino with the help of a well-connected friend who has secured him the exorbitantly expensive licence to kill. Although everything is arranged so that European hunters, having paid, can return home with their trophy—while hunting remains an ancient practice governed by sacred rules—this time the shot misses: a young rhino finds itself in the wrong place, poachers get in the way, and fate decrees that the animal’s death must not be at Hunter’s hands. “Dead is dead. It makes no difference to the rhino who pulls the trigger. Which, of course, makes no sense: even a child knows that no two shots are the same.” As a form of compensation, the white hunter is then offered a proposal redolent of the hubris of a mortal who believes himself to be God: to hunt down a young man. “Are you out of your mind?” protests Hunter. “If you don’t do it, someone else will […] ‘This is Africa. Human life has a different value here.” In exchange for the experience and the new trophy—stuffed, but without the heart, which must be buried in his homeland—the five hundred thousand dollars the white man will pay will be used to fund the medical clinic, send the children to school, award scholarships to the best pupils and, in that way, wildlife will also be preserved. On the one hand, the white hunter needs an alibi, but on the other, his obsession prevails: “The thought of the prey that slipped away will haunt him every night for the rest of his life.”

Schoeters writes a story woven from oxymorons, in which everything is liminal: life exists within death; preservation arises from killing; respect consists in helping others to die, and salvation in carrying on rather than stopping, because ‘that reversal of the natural order is the essence of the hunt’. So where do we stand when we read this? We feel uneasy, however much we may tell ourselves that this is ‘a ritual from the time when man still hunted like an animal amongst animals’: even then, however, he did not hunt his own kind. Are we, then, reading the arrogance of the present between the lines? The solution Schoeters chooses is the only one possible: “On the day of our death, a light breeze will wipe our footprints from the sand. […] It is a dirge for men and for animals, for in death we are all equal”.

Gaea Schoeters
, "Il trofeo
Einaudi", 232 pp., 20 euros