I read this a few months ago and not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. Literally just a diary of a guy who hid it in his trunk secretly hoping that someone would find it and know who he was. Everything about this book was heartbreaking and it is now one of three books where I was uncomfortable at how much I related to the character, in this case the actual guy. HIs ability to write was as impressive as it was devastating and his forever powerful yet crushing hope for something that doesn’t exist to manifest itself for him was what really haunted me. All the people who vanished in his life that he knew he didn’t really know though wanted to, the conversations he wished he could have or that someone else was having, the sunsets that vanish to quickly every time they appear to him, the stories of his childhood that he didn’t want to end.
I think the most harrowing passage of that book was >!when in the beginning he was talking about how his mother died right after he was born and how that didn’t really bother him because to him there was no one to know so there was no one to miss. Then three hundred pages later he was talking about how useless he is, literally describing himself the center of the void that wouldn’t have a shape if it wasn’t for everything around it, and at the end of that passage he just mentions. “My mother died before I could get to know her.”!<
This is yet another book that will forever haunt me. If anyone else has read it I’d love to know your thoughts.
by NotBorris
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It’s one of my favourite books.
A publisher in Norway was such a fan that he opened a pop-up shop that only sold this book. That’s how I came across it!