Eduardo Mendonça > Recent Status Updates

So I decided to re-read this because I looked up some internet forums for House of Leaves investigations and theories and they felt so much like TNC forum sections that I experienced a brief weird derealization I haven't recovered from yet

For a long time you make fun of people who rate books badly because they find the characters unlikeable, and at some point one of those people happens to be you.
Also too plot-heavy in a fundamentally uninteresting way

Currently highly enjoyable, although dragging a bit in some scenes. Mostly into the observations about whether life is the events or the connecting moments between them, about ineffability as a provider of meaning in itself, about the enrichment of experience through ambiguity of communication, etc. Also some vivid Madrid evocations

not sure what the point is

Getting absolutely nothing out of this

The Denise/Brian/Robin plot is a bit dull. I did enjoy the brief passage on the fruitless pursuit of inspiration from Central European cuisines and landscapes though.

I'm annoyed at the occasional gratuitous asides that seem to have no point other than to make a character seem more unlikeable -- Enid dumber, Gary pettier, Alfred meaner. They feel unearned.
Also the random ridiculous minor characters feel very out of place in a "serious" novel with "realistic" characters?!

I'm unsure whether I should take care to read this more slowly, trying to absorb every change in Elio's emotional state and connect it with my previous experience. But maybe I wouldn't be able to anyway: everything was so long ago

Can't believe how long it's taking me to read this, what a piece of shit I am. It feels a little claustrophobic to be so within Elio's mind and be so near to his obsession with Oliver, and how much he anticipates and weighs every reaction and word

Hm.
- Is Elio's perception of Oliver's infallibility accurate, or colored by his attraction and sense of inferiority?
- Are the complexity and ambiguity of Elio's feelings, and the status games they play with each other, to be perceived as maladaptive and petty, or a normal part of the process? (And is Elio's perception of those accurate as well?)

Interesting parallel: the narrator goes through events as sort of non-entity, observing but barely interacting with whom she comes across.
This book is going through me in a similar way, barely leaving a trace in all its accumulation of observations

I like the evocations of London's edgelands -- incoherence and senselessness, rubbish and decay that emanates from the limits of human activity, nature (as it were) as an irruption struggling to maintain its existence

(surreal: the wind)
Some of the observations and reflections are interesting though (e.g. the London buses -- first vs ground floow), and some of the descriptions vivid (e.g. light in St Lawrence, drought and stench in Israel)

I'm still not enjoying it. Except for the chapters where things actually happen. Does that make me basic?
(Also what's with all the surreal stuff?)