Snow White and Russian Red

This book made me want to do more drugs.
The narration reads tight, just behind your sternum, right behind your eyes and in front of your brain. It’s a fast, bloody picaresque that follows the narrator Nails through a few brutal days, its narration style slipping between persons and time and people addressed. Most characters are treated as isolated, unpredictable, each action interpreted as hostile or overlaid with excess layers of meaning by the leaping associations of the narrator. The consciousness of the narrator comes across impossibly clearly.
I’m not sure what happens at the end of this book: the conscious unreliability of Nails slips into a sort of delusion, and then the last pages happen. The best part by far were the last show more ten or so pages, entirely different in tone, told by a plural female first person narrator, but read like a prose poem, plot impossible. It was cool, a relief almost, to be free of the hot urgency of Nails, but frustratingly incomprehensible. show less

A spunky, drug-addled tale from Poland and a teenage author. That a teenager wrote this book is absolutely mind-boggling to me. I can't wait for what comes next.

Ein Drogentrip in einer polnischen Stadt. Hat mir gut gefallen: Kreative Sprache, ganz heute.

Roman très difficile à lire mais bizarrement interpelant; jeunes paumés en Pologne, drogués et antisociaux; langue vive et saccadée