This book intrigues me! I spent a while reading it through, but the extra time felt worth it. I’ve been lowkey slumpy all summer, yet I’m enjoying all the books I’ve been reading, so I’m just going at a slow and comfortable pace.

How to begin describing this book? The writing style is a sort of stream of consciousness, except it’s not the consciousness of the narrator as much as all the people she meets telling about their lives and experiences. While reading, you flow seamlessly from one moment, one topic, to the next, but I also got the feeling I couldn’t take in too much at once. I needed breaks in between each reading session to process it, passively, in a quiet hind-corner of my mind. I feel like I already don’t remember a lot of the details, but the experience in itself was rewarding.

Reading this reminded me of dreaming; you become engulfed in the story then and there and feel an urge to keep going and reach the conclusion, but afterwards the story strikes you as strange or unreasonably distant from your real life, and you struggle to maintain it in your grasp. Instead you move on with your day and forget about it. However, through the dream, your brain has been working hard trying to connect the dots between all your thoughts, trying to make an curious, unconscious sense of the life you’re living and the strange world you find yourself in.

I loved the feeling of drifting from one thought to the next, and the no-strings-attached yet all-strings-attached approach to the characters. They are all just random people, yet they are the main characters and indeed the fundament for this book. There is no plot in the usual sense; the plot is the stories of these random people’s lives. Of course it varied how engaged I became in each individual story, but in general I found myself readily diving into a new scenario and trying to wrap my head around it somehow. I like how the book is ambitious in it’s non-ambition - I think it’s hard to succeed with a project that only features fragmented, day-to-day accounts of unknown characters without a real, red thread moving you forwards.


When I reached this paragraph, I experienced it as a pretty good summary of the experience of the narrator (and also us, the readers) throughout the book:

«He was describing, she realised, a distinction that seemed to grow clearer and clearer the more he talked, a distinction he stood on one side of while she, it became increasingly apparent, stood on the other. He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.»


So to wrap it up, I don’t think people should pick this one up thinking it’s gonna be a quick, short read, but I’d definitely recommend it if you find the premise intriguing and feel ready for a tiny bit of extra effort!