Book Review

I guess I can write a book review. I like books. I read them, when I think i should be doing something better. I just read possible the most depressing book i will ever read in 2008. We need to talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver. I can't really decide. I think i may have enjoyed it. But also i think it may have been a surreptitious waste of time. Though hiding out in my flat for a day and a bit to get through it before i committed suicide was fun.

I don't want to say "it was one of those books that makes you want to kill yourself." It was no Cam Jansen mystery, or SVH serial novel. It was horribly depressing, wholly traumatizing. But a bit like facing Jim Lahey's shit-void. "Yeh hear that boys, those are the shit winds. You are facing here, the shit-void.It's opened wide in front of you. I did think if i didn't finish it before bed i might just have to kill myself rather than face sleep with such a painful and possible un-resolution so fresh in my mind.

So i suppose it is with caution that i highly recommend this novel. Of course you probably aren't as prone as i am to nightmares. But i think those with the most well ordered dreams should be careful to give reading a sleeping a wide berth.

The story unfolds an amazing play with the temporal obsession of most people with being happy. The obsession with finding and filling our lives with things to "make us happy." Its not that it particular warns against, or challenges the practice. it skirts around and affirmation of anything really. A 400 page affirmation of "i don't like that."

For the protagonist her amazing writing of the average American, of what we hate about them and of what makes us fear to be them. Telling of the vast span between what we think we desire and what we have that fills that desire. Calling us out for projections, blaming, and complaining about...well ourselves in the third person.

It starts slow. And only gets slower until you are too deep in the shit pool to climb out, and must wade across to the other end. At which point you paddle fervently to escape the sense of drowning in the despair of being in the life you planned, exactly as you planned it (whether you want to admit it or not).

Though it is lovely to feel like shit before 2001. The book set entirely before April 9th 2001. When there was still life. Its so easy to forget, as though the great divide that failed to materialize when the computers all still worked on January 1st, 8 years ago, later manifested as something we actually had to care about (not that it effected me much. But others felt the shockwave, and im still stuck in the world where we can't remember what life felt like on April 9th 2001).

So read it, i guess. if you want. or don't. Now, i'm not really sure. not sure which.