"..and maybe with so many blades of grass, and white flowers, and magnolia trees everywhere, nobody will ever notice if some of them are missing, or maybe those are the ones that will haunt us forever." A middle aged slacker at the turn of the century and the children he has created and destroyed.
I'm not too hot in stereotypes usually, but it's the best way to describe this book. Stereotypical white guy rants about literally nothing at all.(the misogyny and general overall assholery was just a plus ig 😒)
Also, if he says "I'm not getting sued..." he's getting hurt with a frying pan Rapunzel style. Like dude ain't no one cares about you enough to sue you, chill tf out.
The only good thing about this book was that it was short 🙄
This feels like it's supposed to be a character study of an unlikable character? Because story-wise, nothing changes, and the narrator gives us no reason to care. Also kinda forgettable.
Alright here is my first review for a NetGalley book! Thank you to independant and V. Campudoni for granting me access. Non-spoiler review (as always for NG):
I have quietly ambivalent feelings on rabbit: I don’t have strong feelings, but the ones I do have are mixed. I'd give it a 2.5 stars if I could.
I enjoyed the main character as a narrator, but I thought the main character was not a good man. He is not only unpleasant in his head and in his life, but he is also a bad influence. It is clear that his characterization is intentional though, so I did appreciate his characterization. Still, even though he is said to be a middle-aged man, he constant cursing throughout his narration makes him seem quite immature. That could be intentional as well, though I'm not as sure. Nonetheless, the immaturity helps support the takeaway of the book.
I think the man’s narration, cursing aside, is very much like Camus’ The Stranger. They are both detached, blunt, with our MC being a little bit more deranged and having more personality (low bar though). Like The Stranger, the narration is really dry, with simple sentences full of description.
The MC has a penchant for over-explaining, which ironically makes him sound a little stupid, but also makes his relationship to us, the reader, a little bit more complex. We are introduced to him on the terms of almost friendliness, but because of his over-explanations, it seems like he is also patronizing the reader at times (not a complaint, just an observation).
While being a little bit on the over-explaining and cynical side, the narrator is also incredibly blunt and self-aware of both his cynicism and his derangement, which made me laugh out loud at lead 7x. Yet even though I did laugh, everything between those laughs were really boring descriptions where things happen, but nothing happens. The narrator is entertaining enough for it not to be a painful bore, but he doesn’t have enough personality, much less charisma, to make it enjoyable either.
What I did like about the rabbit more than The Stranger was that the main character’s unfeelingness and cynicism didn’t bleed into the characterization of the side characters. Instead, some were so full of emotion and poetic appreciation of the world that it nicely contrasted the main character, in that way revealing the character’s faults (and how much he sticks out).
rabbit has some really nice poetic sentences in there, but they are few and far between. The ending is similar to The Stranger in the way that it decides at the last 7% to get really deep, as if we didn’t just go through 93% of just “things happening, but not really happening”. However, I think rabbit makes it work better than The Stranger since I believe the takeaway of the rabbit is an insight about its narrator, instead of some simple “no duh” fact about life. Thus, the 93% of “things happening, but not really happening” is actually quite important to understand the ending of the book. Still, that 93% could have been more entertaining.
I’d recommend rabbit to anyone who enjoyed The Stranger, or even enjoyed only the narrative voice of The Stranger. I think The Stranger has more charisma than the rabbit, however, I enjoyed rabbit far more as a piece of work that had something to say.
i found this to be rather thought provoking haunting makes you think about life for real especially this taking place 1999-2000 and today being 2026 and so much is… the same but also different? but the same
A short novella about about regret and acknowledgement. The narrator, primarily through observation of and friendship with a younger neighbour with learning difficulties, unpacks his life to that point.
As the year shifts, in narrative, from 1999 to 2000, there's quiet reflection that, despite fearmongering of Y2K techno-collapse, things, as people, seldom change.