The Epicure's lament

I f***ing loved this book and reading it was a completely immersive experience. It made me love books more which is not a thing a middle aged librarian says nearly ever. The more I analyze it the more confused I am at what enchanted me so much. It is fantastically witty. And the writing made my jaw drop-allusions cleverly twisted, a grasp of high brow and crass, the powerful irony and impossibly uncomfortable situations and every sentence crafted with such detail and love of language- sigh sigh sigh. Humorous, insightful, sensual and acerbic.
The narrator, Hugo, has decided to smoke himself to death and lives alone in his crumbling mansion by the Hudson being an entitled ass. (I bought this early in quarantine after reading about it on a nyt list of books for quarantine then put it aside because I never did get to really quarantine and i was adverse to reading about some whiny trust fund jackass while the world was going to hell in a handbasket but turns out it i was more amenable to it than I thought. )
Hugo is reprehensible, lazy, reclusive. Maybe more so nowadays than when it was written some ten years or so ago, as he loathes children, women to some extent, gays and is a bit haughty when it comes to the lower social classes. Despite his avowed aversions, his steadfast, scathing honesty and relentless self reckoning give him the pardon usually allowed to those who earnestly own their faults. His devotion to food, books, sex and cigarettes and his many contradictions make him a character for the damn ages or at least generation late boomer early x.
His voice is in my head and his ruthless self-inventory made me want to confess, write, tear it all down and mock my shambles. He is so awful and huggable, so sneering and luminous. And the rest of the cast is pretty damn lovable too in their terrible ways. Shlomo the assassin what a guffaw. Stephanie Fox a poor lost cynic herself but my kind of woman almost. And Bellatrix, ha! Such a dark and funny book. Hugo's voice reminded me a wee bit of Ian McEwan's delightfully smarmy fetus in Nutshell but this is the whole damn tree and a squirrel too. I feel like if I met a Hugo in real life, I would not know whether to roll my eyes or squirm. It would not be comfortable. I am not sure if I liked the fourth notebook and I wonder if that was part of the plan all along or if there was some uncertainty about it. I don't know if liking Hugo makes me a bad person. I wonder if I will love this book for a long time or if I will change my mind. Suffice to say, wow.