Tatouine is a stream-of-conciousness novel set inside the mind of an unnamed twentyish man with cystic fibrosis who goes about his life. He gets jobs, leaves jobs, sees his sister, has a romantic interest, changes rentals, takes his drugs, struggles with writer’s block, and makes more than one trip to the hospital. The author himself is a poet and has CF, and this was his first novel.

The moment-to-moment thoughts were sometimes hard to sit with. He is just so lonely, and some of his thoughts so dark. But, he also has a certain amount of levity, a humorously perverse way of seeing the world, and the way people interact with him, that I didn't often find myself putting the book down. I actually found his consciousness fairly easy to fall into, and I would just go with it through its eddies and falls, and as a result read the book much faster than I expected to. I think this book would have brought some AMAZING discussion to Canada Reads had it made the short list. The narrator is constantly escaping, and in so many different ways. With imagination, with alcohol, and just sometimes physically moving himself out of a situation. 

The narrator also shows what life with chronic illness is like: literally everybody else’s, but with a bunch of other crap tossed in. How do you hold down a job when you might have to unexpectedly take 3 weeks off? Then how do you pay rent? Even through tender moments, like a new girlfriend waking him up, alarmed by his breathing. 

Overall, I enjoyed this novel. I couldn’t help but hope for the narrator’s life to change. For something to work out for him. For him to get the help he needs. For him to not push away people who cared for him. I also knew none of that would happen, but to witness and to hope kept me going through.