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It's a mindbending experience when you unlock a specific rhythm, some decoding happens, and it just clicks. Woolf so far has some unmatched groundedness, making a world feel intensely spatial. A character is somehow always relative to something, direction and position scenewise. Objects comes to life with quantities imbued to them. An aeroplane and a church bell has their own "character" introductions for fucks sake.

I know Kafkaesque is overused but somehow it fits in this tiny book. Something about the inexplicably yet mundane and really absurd at the same time ordinary events that happens here is carried by this malicious fog that makes Johnny unreachable by Frank. Really beautiful prose that carries this tension, and can differentiate characters well, for both man and animal alike.

Breakneck pace damn. I can really feel the simmering anger and tension baked in the conversation, contrasted with the surpassingly slow chapters about war. Youd think it would be the reverse no?

I'm literally on the first few pages but it's already packed with such venomous, packed prose. Its the type where you can just go on and read with the pace it was intended for but I can't help but rereading passages. I probably mirror Clarissa's active, overloaded thinking this way tbh.

So immersive so far, I can feel the character's thoughts yes, but also there's a scene of time and place. Lines where Mishima describes a specific scene, yet it never goes out of its way to "expose" itself or to overexplain. I can see the images vividly in my head, yet its abstracted enough (detailed, but not so much) so my brain interprets its as something more surreal, and it explodes in a world of wonder.

The dick can't be THAT good holy shit poor woman, poor man, everyone loses.

I think it's sad that Red didn't truly know who he is, and its unironic that the book works as a character study. We are subjected to his thoughts, words, monologues, it is laid bare but Red can't make sense of it all. Despite how many pages are just him talking, he never gets a resolution. Its just a ploy of the zone that molded him to be like that, aimless, floating on a place what defies human understanding.

So far it works like a character study. Red is presented as this hardened guy all over the years despite his young age. He casually smokes, drinks and works as a Stalker but even then, the Zone has has surprises to share, it is after all incomprehensible, but what's interesting is the Zone is treated as this vehicle to reveal more of Red's thoughts, ideas and perspective is, and how his relations with people work.