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if you combined the worst psychoanalysis of paisley me with the worst drunken conversations i’ve had since turning 18 you’d find, laid bare, the skeletal foundations of chapters 6 - 8 of Sonya. I try my hardest not to relate but these pages are cutting and brutal and distill the human experience to such a succinct point that makes it difficult to read. some of the man stuff is bs but the summary gets there ? idk

Vadim’s narrative during the first paragraph of Sonya is equal parts raw, human, and animalistic. seeing desires, thoughts, and actions laid so barely in text is deeply shocking, yet refreshingly truthful. His comments on boulevards are founded and insightful.

loads of detail into Vadim’s school years. The first few chapters felt like a spring break, but I’m now knee deep in coursework.

Vadim distills and presents himself in a brutally honest light. The encounter with Zinochka is almost diabolical, the power dynamic and relationship between himself and his mother is questionable, and the way in which he presents himself in class draws the strangest parallels to diary of a wimpy kid. so far the narrative feels like a steady decline and i am hooked.

holy fuck. the medley of intertwined characters and stories and their final resolve in chapter 4, you think that they might not go, you think that they might actually make it out. but no, and the suffocation of the house; it hits so close to home, there’s so much of my 15 year old self in these pages if i’d ever managed to go through with it. lost for words innit

loving the book so far ! i like the fact that the narrative feels like a series of scenes or vignettes. i like that despite being mostly retrospective it still manages to shock and enthral in a way that i didn’t expect for this narrative structure. the chapters are super long but that’s not an issue as there are enough page breaks to pause wherever.