(3.5/5)

I'm crying as I write this.

The blurb on this book read "Astonishing and unsettling" and I agree with both statements, but mostly with the latter. This book crawled under my skin and I'm afraid it's staying there for the upcoming week.

It's completely heartbreaking and so goddamn sad that I felt its physical effect on me. I was sickened, and I felt dread creep up on me in every scene after 130 pages. I shiver when I think about it, I feel the hollowness of it lingering every time I find my thoughts drifting back to the book, to the scenes, to the lines, to Jude and to Willem.

I guess it would have been easy, giving this book 5 stars. It is, after all, a masterpiece,
something unlike anything I've read. But I can't find it in me to give it that final star. I found the violence to be so senseless, and the ending of it to be unfair. I know that life is unsettling and senseless at times and unfair for most of the time, and it didn't give Jude an easy hand, but seeing everything just get taken away from him so suddenly. Willem. His best friend and the love of his life, taken away and in such a violent manner, too, was simply too much. I guess seeing the effect it had on me meant that I genuinely cared about this story, and I did. I cared about Jude. I genuinely wanted him to get better. But like Harold at the end of the book, I knew it had happened. I had an inkling very early on that it had already happened, and I'm just reading the journey to that brutal ending. And, like Harold, I want to think that Willem and Jude are now together. I want to think that they're in their house, happy, untouchable.

*big sigh* Now I have to pick up a romantic comedy.