I must’ve skipped reading this in high school; I have no memory of it at all. Today at 52, I’m writing this because I (still?) find it unmemorable and, should I forget it again, would like to save myself the trouble of rereading it in the future.

I don’t know what others get out of this. I would like to have that conversation one day. Me, I found myself more interested in the pathology than in anything else: what sort of brain damage renders a person so affectless? And how can one so emotionally dead manage to capture, so exquisitely, the precise details that highlight the emptiness of the lives of those around him? It doesn’t work: only a gifted human observer could zero in so perfectly on the details that will so horrify the reader. It's a Catch-22: the psychically empty protagonist, perfect memory notwithstanding, could not have the perception to note the details that make the book so powerful.

Did I say human earlier on? Because none of the principal characters here are. They go through motions, but none of them displays even the slightest awareness of other people (or creatures) as real. Everyone and everything are mere props in a pointless tedious farce. They have their roles, and they can mouth the lines, but does anyone feel? The only traces of self-reflection are in the narrator, and those are so clinical as to render them meaningless—that being the point, I’m sure. Maybe an important point in high school. At my age, when I’ve spent the majority of my life shedding shallow vapid meaningless people, I just have no interest in meeting them on paper either.

I’m obviously missing something big. I intend to seek out trusted friends and find out what.