I really liked this, and it had elements of such a great premise and some really inspired prose. However, I just keep coming back to how heavy-handed it was at times, which really took me out of it. I much preferred the more ambiguous plotting, and the moralizing at the end was so on the nose that it made the "reveal" feel overdone rather than self-evident. I did love the vibe and even came to love the cranky main character, but this felt not-quite-there because of the heavy-handed-ness. However, I'm only being so picky because the bones were so good!! I'm definitely going to keep my eyes peeled for van der Wouden's next work

Delicious. Scrumptious. Finger-lickin good. Even as I was reading I was looking forward to reading again. Honestly I wish I had read this for class so I could pick it apart and write all over and really dig in. Anyway. I thought this was a near-perfect novel. I loved the cyclical storytelling, the movement between comment and narrative, the political impinging on the personal and the personal into the political, and I loved the two couples (though I prefer Thomas and Tereza). Points off for moments of uncomfortable man-on-woman gaze and weird sexual turns of phrase, but the content is unmatched. Can’t wait to return 

The style read like a Dickensian novel with outlandish characters and stuffy, stilted dialogue (derogatory). Man discovers the poverty in which half the world lives (also derogatory): ~ revolutionary ~

Aw I loved this. So glad I read this now (as I can't imagine how well this book will age given its truly reflective picture of the ~ internet discourse ~ of our time). The turn of pace was so delicious and came just at the right time. I even shed a tear as I finished this. I loved Lockwood's voice in this: cringey but so dead-on and laugh-out-loud funny. So tender and filled with love even in the midst (but not in spite of) our internet-laden lives! I'll be thinking about how the author uses the title for a long time.... 

I am glad I came back to this after abandoning it in September. I can’t tell if the plot (or my enjoyment of it) was greatly helped by the introduction of a love affair or if I just needed fresh eyes, but I enjoyed the tail end of this book. Frank, deeply (psychologically) Midwestern: the humble getting-on-with-it of a mundane (but not unrewarding) life. The kind of book I think I would enjoy more if I come back to it in the “autumn” of my life, if you will, or perhaps in a greater state of disillusionment and futility 

Erotica??? More like pedophilia, incest, genital mutilation, and many other disturbing stories!!! Was trying to read this to get into Anaïs Nin before reading her diaries but this truly spooked me. Would have loved an index of which ones are deeply fucked up and reprehensible and which are safe for human eyes so I could enjoy these 

I’m loathe to review these as real books but also feel the need to document everything I read for class. So. This was fine but dry dry dry and basically in list form. This could’ve been an email. I buy his argument tho so

Dare I say, flop? Started out great. I’m not opposed to toxic relationships in and of themselves, and I find reading about them to be really compelling and interesting. But this just got worse and worse for worse and worse’s sake. If a book is going to be troubling, at least do it for a reason. And I see what was supposed to be happening (communist dreams lost, the infiltration of the emptiness of capitalism, fall of East Berlin, I get it) but it didn’t dig any deeper than sheer awful-ness. Also, I don’t know if this is a translation thing or perhaps a German rhetoric thing, but I couldn’t figure out WHAT this girl was saying half the time. Twisty sentence fragments, interjecting historical monologues, references to clipped phrases with no (grammatical) resolution. So sad about this because on paper this is such a me book. 

Wow wow WOW I loved this book. Another book I wish I had written. The perfect late-stage capitalism (anti-)love story set against the 2008 financial crisis and Croatia’s accession to the EU. Tightly wrought, tense, darkly comic, and addictive. The perspective switching was so entrancing and natural that I didn’t even consciously realize it was happening until a few chapters in, and the repeated tropes were masterfully sprinkled about. I love reading about messed up, complicated relationships, and this was no exception. A perfect novel I think!!!! (And an excellent, natural-feeling translation)

Some favorite quotes I want to hang onto bc I read this in a library copy and can’t underline them: 

I’m shocked and saddened to report that I don’t think I liked this book. On paper it has everything I love: an unreliable narrator, weird but compelling premise, dogs and donkeys, sapphic entanglements. I think it was just simply too weird. I love a zany book, but the characters were simply too bizarre for me to understand, much less relate to and root for. 
I was also put off by the main character’s 45-year-old-ness

(I don’t feel a need to delve into the sex lives of the middle aged quite yet)

. 
And finally, this book had a lot of weird gaps?? Talk about telling not showing. I never understood Great and Big Swiss’s dynamic

(what was with their weird passive aggression?? Don’t even get me started on the stone top-ness)

and we would suddenly jump to an interaction between them that I couldn’t trace to how we got there. Overall, too odd, too millennial/Gen X, too shock-oriented, and just overall too off-putting to ever fully jump into. This was truly sad to report