“empty thoughts! — that may be, but they torture me more than any reality”

Hard to follow and hard to read (if approached in a chronological, story telling way) not only because the book is pretty much a collection of hallucinations and dream like thoughts but also by the shear amount of gore and violence at some points. Just like the narrator who has no concept of time we loose the ability to tell the time jumps happening. There is a lot of repeating images, people and numbers just like having a conversation with an intoxicated person repeating what’s on their subconscious. The whole book feels like a fever dream. Reaching the end of the book will have you thinking “that was so fucked up” for a good min. The narrator shows his lack of moral all through out the book.

"I had not considered myself unfortunate and accursed to such a degree. However, by way of a sense of malefaction that was hidden in me, at the same time an unfamiliar happiness, a reasonless happiness came over me--because I understood that I had a commiserator from the past--was not this painter from times past, a painter who painted on this jug hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago, my commiserator? Did not the same worlds pass through me? Until this moment I counted myself as the most miserable of creatures, but now I realized that during the time when on those mountains, in those abandoned villages and houses that were made with heavy mud bricks, a people lived whose bones were now decayed and whose disintegrated parts perhaps now resided in bruised morning glories--among these people there was one star-crossed painter, one accursed painter, maybe there did exist a miserable painter of pen case covers like me, exactly like me--and now, I realized, I completely understood that he, too, had liquefied and burned inside of two large, black eyes--exactly like me--and it was this that gave me solace."

This passage has been running through my head all day today. I went back to find it to quickly quote from it for my review, but I realized that I would have to include the whole thing. This passage perfectly represents Hedayat's goal of writing this book: he wanted it to be an experience for his readers--one that they could relate too--and he wanted to share a story so close to our stream of consciousness that readers felt as if they were reading their own thoughts transcribed on paper. In essence, Hedayat serves as our own commiserator. This book can be defined as the ultimate commiseration over the meaninglessness of life, the sameness of our existence, the illusions of time, and the promise of death.