I don’t quite know what to make of this. This felt like a mix of Claire-Louise Bennett’s essay-like ramblings (where each chapter doesn’t follow from the one before and they consist more of societal comments/musings than prose/plot) oddly with such a similar plot to No One Is Talking about This, which was completely randomly timed but I loved NOITAT sooooo much that this fell flat in comparison. I did like the narrator’s voice and chuckled to myself about how real it is to be so depressed but just keep on going (“at twenty-three, it’s too late for everything”), reading books (“yes, I sat on the sofa all day, but I was reading”), and being gay (“some women make me feel wholly lesbian”). You can tell Eva Baltazar is a poet because the sentences are so weighty (“there’s nothing more blinding than blood”; “imminence is just the carrot dangled by the future to keep us present”). In a word: atmospheric. Hard to pin down, not quite any one thing (gay coming of age? Family musings? Millennial drifting through European cities trying to figure it out? Suicidal ideation?). I think I liked it, but I’m not sure? (Perhaps that was the end result she was going for)