Status Updates From The People in the Trees

"Here we knew it had been raining only because the trees---so incessantly thirsty I thought of them as stands of throats, greedily swallowing every drop they could---sweated water..."

Meow this sentence has me drooling

There's some really subtle stuff going on that I'm digging a lot, the protagonist discussing his time in a science lab and breezily narrating his killing of mice, describing it in horrific detail as if it was nothing, now on the Ivu'ivu island being kept awake at night imagining the indigenous people there murdering little monkeys they eat as a delicacy with horror. Very nice.

not calling it DNF yet but oof

“‘…if you eat the opa’ivu’eke, the gods are happy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They will let you… […] They will let you live forever. Like they promised.’”

It's an odd book so far, I'm curious about where it's going to go based on how the protagonist is initially introduced, I'm enjoying the interesting structure of it and the way it allows for commentary within the narrative via the footnotes. Very nerdy, so very appealing for me.

This is some of the most stunning prose I’ve ever read