Kleinzeit

by Russell Hoban

Kleinzeit. In German, that means "hero." Or "smalltime." It depends on whom you ask.

On a day like any other, Kleinzeit gets fired. Hours later, he finds himself in hospital with a pair of adventurous pyjamas and a recurring geometrical pain. Here he falls instantly in love with a beautiful night nurse called Sister. And together they are pitched headlong into a wild and flickering world of mystery...

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, 20th Century, American, Literary Fiction, Magical Realism

191 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Russell Conwell Hoban was an American expatriate writer. His works span many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magical realism, poetry, and children's books. He lived in London, England, from 1969 until his death. (Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kleinzeit is ill… He feels pain…

There it was again, like a signal along a wire. A clear brilliant flash of pain from A to B. What was A? What was B? Kleinzeit didn’t want to know. His hypotenuse was on that side, he thought. Maybe not. He’d always been afraid to look at anatomical diagrams. Muscles, yes. Organs, no. Nothing but trouble to be expected from organs.

Kleinzeit goes to the hospital on the way being sacked from his job… Kleinzeit means ‘small-time’ in German… Probably it’s a hint at being a nonentity… There he meets a Sister…

Night, crepitating slowly, beat by beat. Sister on nights now, glowing in the lamplit binnacle of her office, overlooking the ward as a captain on his bridge, watching the black bow cleave the white wave, watching the compass eye, jewelled in the dark. Thrum of the engines, heave of the sea, silent-roaring, seething and sighing. Dimness of the ward. Groans, gurgles, choking, gasping, splatting in bedpans. Stench. Groans. Curses.

Will there be a romance? Yes, there will be a metaphysical romance… In the thoroughly experimental style… 
Kleinzeit buys a glockenspiel… Motifs of Orpheus and Eurydice are hinted at… The Underground is something like Hell…

Sister in the Underground, walking about in corridors. Approached at varying intervals by three middle-aged men and two young ones she declined all offers. There used to be more young ones, she thought. I’m getting on. Soon be thirty.

This time round Orpheus and Eurydice seem to change roles…

An intolerably calm placid smiling cheap vulgar insensitive neo-classical blue sky. Sappho! boomed the sky. Homer! Stout Cortes! Nelson! Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Liberty, Equality, Fraternity! David! Napoleon! Francis Drake! Industry! Science! Isaac Newton! Man’s days are few and full of sorrow. Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?

Whatever happens, rejoice.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

At last I have hobbled into my second Hoban some three years late. Zinging and stinging. Capital-O Original. On the surface level a piece of delirious absurdism where God, the Hospital, the Word, and pieces of yellow paper are allowed a voice in the narrative, but in the interstices a dark exploration of—what?—the psychology of illness (is that a thing?), fragmented mental states as a metaphor for—what?—those old shibboleths: postmodern corporatised living or the multiple painful births that make up the creative process? The language in this slim novel is exceptional and my eyes are now wide open to the works of Hoban and here’s to a Hoban revival on GR as a result of this paltry review and the enormous influence my words have over everyone on this site. You have your orders, minions!

[Fionnuala]

A smalltime copywriter faces some big time challenges when he pens some advertising copy on a sheet of yellow paper in this super creative piece of multi-layered fiction. Characters include a mysterious red bearded tramp, every man's dream nurse, a hospital bed and Death. The Peloponnese wars and Orpheus and Eurydice also make an appearance.
Warning: don't read this novel if you've been experiencing any difficulties with the angle of your hypotenuse!

[emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kleinzeit put the paper into his typewriter with a sheet of carbon paper—shook some dandruff over the machine and began to write a television commercial for Bonzo Toothpaste.

Harold Pinter ‘Lite’ (but a little lighter than ‘Lite’). Like Pinter, Hoban is very certainly not for everyone — an ‘acquired taste’ to put quite simply (admittedly, I haven’t fully ‘acquired’ the taste for Hoban(yet?)). I prefer Pinter, for now anyway. ‘Kleinzeit’ didn’t leave much of an impression (at least not a very lasting one I feel), but I ‘enjoyed’ the bits about/with ‘Orpheus’. I was sent/gifted a copy of The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz recently, but simply judging from the ‘blurbs’, the ‘plot’ seems rather not-my-kind-of-thing. But regardless, I can see myself reading more Hobans at some point later (even if this is just a case of blind(ed) optimism?). Turtle Diarymaybe? Since that is supposedly the one that Pinter adapted to ‘stage’/for a ‘play’?

Tell me more about Orpheus, said Kleinzeit.

When Orpheus remembered himself, said Hospital, he came together so harmoniously that he began to play his lute and sing with immense power and beauty. No one had ever heard of it. Trees and all that, you know, rocks even, they simply picked themselves up and moved to where he was. Sometimes you couldn’t see Orpheus because of the rocks and trees around him. He was tuned into the big vibrations, you see, he and the grains of sand and the cloud particles and the colours of the spectrum all vibrating together. And of course it made him a tremendous lover. Krishna with the cowgirls was nothing to what Orpheus was.

‘Kleinzeit’ felt like — a bit (of Hoban) ‘trying too hard’ sometimes, and that, I didn’t enjoy, I skimmed. I like absurdism/absurdist literature, but I like it best with a (preferably) bottomless serving of something ‘dark’. I need it to be 'dark' to fully enjoy it/the humour. Take the darkness out of absurdism and it no longer makes any sense. Make it make sense! (admittedly, a horribly ironic phrase since (far more) hardcore absurdist literature tends to be ambiguous as fuck) An in-between? Lukewarm? Dimmed ‘humour’? Turned down? Why the need to dilute — I honestly don’t see the point of it, just go mad with it, please? It’s like asking Michael Bay to make a film that is ‘less intense’. It won’t hit the same; it won’t ‘hit’ at all (period). Hoban’s writing is not terrible at all, but it just feels very ‘reserved’/’held back’. Nothing tantalisingly ‘transgressive’. Some lines that are meant to be ‘funny’ (or seems like they were written to be) just didn’t do it for me. It fucking brushed me lightly, and it felt uncomfortable. Watered down absurdist humour just translates into ‘bad cringe’ (to me), or ‘bare cringe’ — fuck it, it’s both.

What about Eurydice? said Kleinzeit. How’d they meet? I don’t think that’s told in any of the stories. All I know is that she went to the Underworld after she died of a snakebite.

More schoolboy rubbish, said Hospital. Orpheus met Eurydice when he got to the inside of things. Eurydice was there because that was where she lived. She didn’t have to get bitten by a snake to go there. With the power of his harmony Orpheus penetrated the world, got to the inside of things, the place under the places. Underworld, if you like to call it that. And that’s where he found Eurydice, the female element complementary to himself. She was Yin, he was Yang. What could be simpler?

If the Underworld was where she lived, why did he try to get her out of it? said Kleinzeit.
Ah, said Hospital. There you have the essence of the Orphic conflict. That’s why Orpheus became what he is, always in the present, never in the past. That’s why that dogged blind head is always swimming across the ocean to the river mouth.

He didn’t lose her because he looked back? said Kleinzeit.

That’s the sort of thing that gets put into a story of course, said Hospital. But looking back or not looking back wouldn’t have made any difference.

Little things I was able to appreciate in the book (that heavy-lifted this from a wobbly 2* to a solid 3*) : Hoban adding ''SPURS. ARSENAL.'' right in the middle of the book for no apparent reason (and with no further explanation) in a paragraph where the narrator travels through the tunnels of the London Underground. And/but the itching question is : is Kleinzeit COYS or COYG? Or is this just one of Hoban's terrible 'jokes'? Marrying the two like 'salt' and 'pepper'. Quite cute, to be fair. Another ‘little thing’ worthy of a mention is that there is a (terrible; and deliberately so I would say) poem written on a Rizla paper about ‘Golden Virginia’ (while it's nothing 'beautiful', the 'visual' and (albeit rather 'kitschy' comic element of it is quite 'fun'). If you don’t care much for ‘plot’, and mostly ‘here’ for ‘vibes’, ‘Kleinzeit’ is a ‘decent’ experience. Nothing near a mind-altering/life-changing experience, but it’s ‘okay’. Not (in every sense of the word) ‘mad’ about it.

‘Golden, Golden, Golden Virginia,
Be my tobacco, be my sin.’

‘Golden, Golden, Golden Virginia,
Be my original, be my tin.’

Golden Virginia by JJ as a mental palate cleanser for the above — for that ‘bad’-poetry aftertaste, if necessary (but even if not).

Let Go is a better song from the album (but admittedly it doesn’t hit as hard as compared to when I listened to it years ago; sonic affinities (pretentious term I am carelessly using in place of ‘musical taste’)/people change, etc.), but confessedly this is outrageously irrelevant.

‘Care for a banana? said Kleinzeit.
Thanks, said Death. I don’t eat bananas.’

‘Anything I can do for you? said Death.
Not right now, said Kleinzeit. Just, you know, stick around.
Twenty-four hour service, said Death.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 1 out of 5]

118th book of 2022.

I'm into surrealism and absurdism but Hoban's novel here is just too much for little reason. I can't put my finger on why it doesn't work when I adore Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, for example, which is filled with crazy characters and happenings. Kleinzeit goes into hospital and from there falls in love with one of the nurses, meets Death, who is a monkey, has run-ins with a homeless man, yellow paper and just about every inanimate object in the book talks, so there are numerous conversations he has with his hospital bed, the paper, the building itself, God, whatever. About several pages in I started to lose the excitement I had going into this and by halfway through I was wanting it to just end. I only stuck it out to the end because it's short. I do have another Hoban novel I'm willing to try, but if it's anything like this, I'll keep my distance from him in the future.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kleinzeit. Russell Hoban - writer of children's stories. 1969. To London. Stays. Marriage to illustrator wife dissolves. 1974, writes Kleinzeit. I was preparing for the big jump from provincial south-west to universal and metrosexual London. Now read on.....

Whether its off-the-wall sativa-induced nonsense or state-of-the-art postmodernist Londinium magical realism is up to you, but its a damn fine pager-turner. You want more of the lunacy and its own random brand of sense. Like Tony Hancock writing one-liners with a hefty dose of Beckett laid over the top like a fine screed.

God talks; Shiva talks; the Hospital talks; the Bed hugs; Death is a chimp; The Word speaks!; Action spends most of his time in the nick; Kleinzeit the copywriter is fired and hospitalised for musical dissonance in his geometric organs. Its Allcock. Things disappear. Meaningless and funky. The Underground looms large. The Tube and mythic Orpheus and Eurydice.

Thucydides and History of the Peloponnesian War as the I Ching: .

And a circuitous round fantasy of how he wrote the first chapters on yellow A4 paper after escaping from Ward A4.

Its like a decent yoga teacher - not too full of mystical bullshit; enough to keep you going and you feel better after and hour and a half.

And Milton

Action lounged against the front of the hospital, took a deep drag on his cigarette, flipped it into the gutter, looked at his watch, looked at passing taxis, spun on his heel, went into the hospital.
Standing by the reception desk were two policemen.
Who've you come to see? they said. Kleinzeit, said Action, and headed for the stairs.
The two policemen each grabbed an arm, hustled him outside, into police van, took him away.

[Rod · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's say ★★★½. Enjoyable and funny, but I never felt that connected to it. Maybe a little too much absurdity-for-absurdity's-sake for my taste. This was Hoban's second novel, though, and he was still finding his voice as a writer. Maybe I'll dig it more on a re-read.

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5

Shocker!!!! Ongelofelijk goed. Kerstcadeautje nodig voor een prettig gestoorde intellectueel in je leven? Stop de zoektocht. Ptn.
Metaphysical/philosophical/speculative novel/fiction, hoe je het ook wil noemen, voor mij ongetwijfeld één van de beste in het genre.

"It isn't a matter of finding a well man, it's a matter of finding one who makes the right use of his sickness. (...) None but the sick deserve the fair, eh?"

"Nothing is yours, mate. Even you aren't yours. You least of all are yours."

"O God, the detail of it all, the overwhelming weight of the detail of a life remembered. (...)
O God, said Kleinzeit. I was born, I had a mother and a father and a brother, I lived in a house, I had a childhood, I was educated, did military service, got married, had a daughter and a son, bought a house, got divorced, found a flat, lost my job, here I am. Is this a record?

If it is I wish you’d stop playing it, said God. Kleinzeit still didn’t hear him.

Memories are bad enough, said Kleinzeit. I also have insurance policies, a lease, birth, marriage and divorce certificates, a will, passport, driver’s licence, cheque account and savings account, bills paid and unpaid, letters unanswered, books, records, tables, chairs, paperclips, desk, typewriter, aquarium, shaving cream, toothpaste, soap, tape recorder, clocks, razor, gramophone, clothes, shoe polish. I have neckties I’ll never wear again.

Excuse me, said God. I’ve got the whole wide world in my hand and I’d like to put it down for a while."

"There is nothing to be afraid of." "Right. Nothing is what I am afraid of, and there's moree nothing every day".

"I don't think you care all that much about what happens to me". "'Don't expect me to be human', said God".

[Dead John Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this in 1974 when I was younger. I was so taken with it that it occupied me for a long, long time.

Today I picked it up, outside the temperature was dropping, snow was imminent and I am packing up to move house. I came across this book and sat down in front of the fire and started to read it again. After a few hours I did some more packing then sat down and finished it.

As you can see I've given it 5 stars and it obviously still impresses me no end.

It is a surreal, poetic story about illness, significance, love, sex (1974 sex), mystery and meaning. It is very clever but not enough to piss you off. It is coherently clever. This is one of the books that have put me off writing forever. It introduced me to the deeper meaning of Orpheus and Eurydice and as such I have never forgotten it.

It was an uplifting, naive, experience to read this book and refreshingly so. It is as far from "Gone Girl" and its ilk as you can get. It is a work of imagination where your imagiation will be required to suspend disbelief and mundanity too.

What more can I say? Thank You Mr Hoban

[Dirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was hat das alles zu bedeuten? fragte Kleinzeit.
Wie kann es eine Bedeutung geben? fragte das Krankenhaus. Eine Bedeutung ist eine Begrenzung. Es gibt keine Grenzen.

Metaphorische Relativitätstheorie als poetische Spielwiese.
Ein leichtes, kurzweiliges, witziges, aber auch tiefgründiges Lesevergnügen.

Hauptakteure:
Kleinzeit
Dr. Pink
Krankenhaus
Krankenschwester
Gelbes Papier
Rotbart
U-Bahn
Glockenspiel
Gott
Thukydides und
Der Peloponnesische Krieg
Tod
Action
Das Wort

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved every page of this weird little book. Completely original. My first by Hoban, but I've got more on the way.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a strange book.

"And you think you've got answers coming to you. What a baby! You and your Ibsen and your Chekhov. Maybe the revolver in the drawer's for another play, you ever think of that? You think your three acts are the only three bloody acts there are? Maybe you're the revolver in somebody else's play, eh? Never thought of that, did you. It's all got to mean something to you."

Kleinzeit picks up a piece of yellow A4 paper in the Underground, writes an idea on it, and gets fired. Later he ends up in Hospital, who claims it isn't anything personal. In this book everything talks to Kleinzeit, from Yellow Paper and Hospital to Death, Word, Action, and of course, God—who's not very good at remembering names. Details aren't his thing. There are overarching themes about inspiration, agency, sickness, and death.

"It is my opinion, she said to God, that nobody is healthy.
Look at you, said God. Who could be healthier?
Oh, women, said Sister. I'm talking about men. One way and another they're all sick."

This book is a mess of different ideas and themes with a lightly scribbled line of plot running through it. I really enjoyed the unusual writing style and the humour, the observations and philosophy delivered via one-liners from inanimate objects, and even the process of trying to understand the themes. As the quote above suggests, answers aren't given up easily. It's better when it's funny, but even when it dispenses with humour and becomes a bit more absurdly tragic towards the end, I still got something out of it. It's one of those books ripe for interpretation that I'd love to discuss with others. On the other hand, female representation is very two-dimensional and there is a whole lot of innuendo which felt very of its era, even if a lot of this was poking fun at the social mores of the time. It is very obviously a book written by a man.

Still, it's a unique, fun read, and it'll stick with me.

[Tim Rollin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book.
This the middle of 3 other books I decided to peek at the first paragraph and then the novel just had a natural gravity and fun to it.
Where it was basically reading itself.
It has very short chapters a page long.
Which gives it a strong pull or momentum.
But on a line to line, paragraph to paragraph basis it is just to fun to read.

The different talking objects in his life. The mirror, the bed, the sky, the hospital, God.

It is surreal but has a consistent logic that makes sense even though you aren't sure how.
It feels right. And it has mystery that drives you forward.

It is awesome. An instant favourite.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absurd and sad and metaphysical and zany and celebratory and affirming and confusing and understated.
Hoban draws heavily on myth and existentialist theory as well as exuberant humour and joie de vivre.
A thoroughly enlightening read.

[Nigel McFarlane · Rating 4 out of 5]

If magical surrealism were a genre, it would probably look like this.

Very few writers could pull such a thing off without descending into self-indulgence, but every page here is packed with wit, imagination and bawdy humour. It's clever and funny, and its existence would be justified alone by one appallingly rude film poster starring Prong Studman and Immensa Pudenda.

But it's not just a picaresque romp: embedded in the weirdness is a touching story of a valiant little guy struggling with health, creativity and inevitable doom.

As if that weren't enough, this novel also generates an entire new genre of hypochondria: I'm now seriously concerned about my hypoteneuse.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would be interesting to know how a Lacanian psychoanalyst would interpret the fictional world in which this retelling of a classical myth is set, and in which signifiers are in disorder. The protagonist, for instance, learns that he has trouble with his hypotenuse when he experiences a pain traveling from A to B; in the hospital, he meets a patient who is suffering from a condition that worsens into hendiadys. Perhaps Hoban is suggesting that in a postmodern world of alienated labor and advertising saturation, the classic trivium and quadrivium have been marginalized, and that, in a “return of the repressed,” these traditional disciplines are re-emerging in neurotic forms, as linguistic distortions. This may be part of the reason that Kleinzeit, who reads Thucydides in his spare time, begins learning to play the glockenspiel and to write poems.

Acquired Sept 23, 1998
Cheap Thrills, Montreal, Quebec

[Karen Massie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my all time favourite books. I first read it when I had just left home aged 16 and I still love it just as much today. I realise everyone is entitled to their own opinion but I don't understand this need people have to over analyse the books they read. They seem to be so busy telling us what the author was obviously meaning ,and pointing out how deep and meaningful this is or is failing to be, that they seem to forget to just sit back and enjoy the book in all its charm and absurdity.
The way that he manages to make opposing characters of believable depth, contrast and feeling out of pretty much everything from the sublime (Sister and the Bed! ) to the ridiculous (God and the Hospital! ) has me smiling from beginning to end. I can't see a sheet of yellow paper without longing to just go and right something random. So on that note - " Walk in danger, walk in error,
Walk ahead in Morton Taylor. "

[Jude · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is my opinion, she said to God, that nobody is healthy.

Look at you, said God. Who could be healthier?

Oh, women, said Sister. I'm talking about men. One way or another they're all sick.

You really think so? said God. He rained a little harder.
What did I do wrong? How have I failed?

I can't exactly say what I mean, said Sister. It just sounds stupid. What I mean is, it isn't a matter of finding a well man, it's a matter of finding one who makes the right use of his sickness.

[Terry Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of Russell Hoban's books are pretty bonkers and this one is no exception but in amongst all that confusion there's sense and reality that shine through eventually. He is a very imaginative and unique author.

[Mark Vayngrib · Rating 3 out of 5]

what a wacky book. I'm amazed I read the whole thing, and I don't know who I could possibly recommend this to. Maybe Yossarian from Catch-22, if he's still alive and uses Goodreads, or whomever this Review has been licensed to. Is it a leap of faith to assume the future caters exclusively to my vanity, or is it a leap of something else?

By the way, where am I, Review asks me? I don't know, I'll let you know when I find you.

Most non-fictional people I imagine would read this and be exhausted by the constant whimsy (or hallucinatory stream of consciousness), allegory (or pretension, or ironic pretension), personification of everything (Everything hates being personified, Personification tells me). I'm exhausted myself.

Then again, though it's not your standard fare, it's not your standard fare, so there's something to be said for that.

[Sapetron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as a backdrop for musings on the creative process, Kleinzeit is an extremely original novel. The writing is very clever, so clever that at times it becomes a bit tedious, with a few eye-roll moments such as the disclosing by the doctor-cum middle school bully that his yacht's eponym is "Atropos" she who often cuts short lives. Very Cute. Regardless of its self-indulgent moments, the book is enough of a page turner that I consumed it in two evenings after a full days' work: a riveting read. The anthropomorphized objects and institutions are almost full characters, and yet not. The book has the tempo of a satirical play. Its strongest points are in the uniqueness of the writing and the lessons it can teach us about how we approach a novel, as it shrewdly dumps the oatmeal of our expectations over our unsuspecting skulls.

[Aidan Bairstow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Went back and forth between three and four stars when rating this one. Absolutely wasn't expecting a metaphysical novel, which threw me off a bit at first, but ended up enjoying it on the whole (albeit not quite as much as Turtle Diary). The nature of Hoban's writing made this a book I'd enjoy depending on when I picked it up - at times the humour leaps off every page, and the succinct chapters made it easy to move through large amounts of the book at a time. Other times though, by virtue of the novel's style, the personification of any given object in a scene can get pretty exhausting. Would (most likely) read again though!

[Ruth Ashford · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first read this book about 30 years ago and it was a revelation to me, mainly because of the stylistic device which Russell hoban uses to give inanimate objects a voice. I found it very funny at the time. The main character is a patient in a hospital with a mysterious illness. He repeatedly tries to escape, and eventually recovers. The other characters are bed, hospital, underground and sky, as well as humans. Although I still think it is original and funny, it is very dated from a female perspective as the female characters are very 2d.

[Jeff Lewonczyk]

A “small-time” 45-year-old ad copywriter, undergoing an inchoate series of health issues affecting organs such as his hypotenuse and his diapason, attempts to escape his fate as a terminal nobody by transforming himself into an Orpheus of the London Underground. With its motley array of puckish puns and symbolic characters - a hungry Hospital, the ghost of Thucydides, a simian but gentlemanly Death - the book employs nursery rhyme logic to explore the complex challenge of finding moral and emotional purpose from inside a decaying body.

[Charlie Gill · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars.

Hoban is a totally idiosyncratic author, and trying to write a short summary wouldn't do him any justice. Review soon. At its core, the story is an interrogation on story writing. Set in London it is rammed with symbolism (Woe the Head of Orpheus) and taken to extremes by an absurdist/ magical note to reality.

"Untwisting all the chains that ty / The hidden soul of harmony."

[Daniel · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is like a piss yellow couch in the style of the seventies.


There's a little bit of a floral odor to mask the fact that so many have pissed on this selfsame couch throughout the years.

[Robin Petty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary in *every* sense of the word
If you can’t identify with Kleinzeit’s state of mind, or have never seen glimpses of it in a loved one, then ‘there, but for the grace of God, go lucky you’.
A tart critique of the hamster wheel that is modern medicine. Instead, an evocative paen to the redemptive power of love, curiosity and a healthy state of nonchalance.

[Hyrum · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just another book from a well connected person, well received by the public but only because somehow it got great publicity or people convinced themselves it was great, not because it was great. Most books give me something interesting to think about. Although Kleinzeit did offer some interesting thoughts, here and there, the author seemed overly confident of his brilliance. Not impressed.

[Belle · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rounded down. I really liked the middle of this book, and made lots of highlights and laughed a lot. But I found the last part less fun and less interesting, and didn’t find the ending very satisfying. I’m glad I read it and I’m glad it was short.

[George Tompkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

no doubt it's both funny and clever, but I think I've moved past being default-seduced by postmodern fiction. Read more like something I would be recommended, rather than something I actually really enjoyed 🤔