The knowledge that this particular Irishman does not actually exist was, in places, the only thing that kept me reading.
Its narrator is an Irishman living in London and then in Minnesota. It is a novel written by a Dutch person and originally published in Amsterdam ten years ago.
Something that might comfort you (it did me) is that although this is written by “Anonymous”, although the narrator presents it as a memoir, and despite all of the seductive marketing around it that suggests its author has embarked on a decade-long guerrilla social media campaign, it is not non-fiction. They just might not be the parts the author intended. But there are parts of it that I think are very valuable. And did it completely redeem itself in my eyes? Not completely. Furthermore, The Pool describes the whole book as “as hipster as a £3 bowl of Rice Krispies on Shoreditch High Street.” So, am I its ideal reader? Is it even remotely my aesthetic? Hell to the no. Its very first line is “I liked hurting girls”, and the second line is “Mentally, not physically.” If you’ve spent much time around here at all, you’ll know that I have personal experience of men who like hurting girls mentally-not-physically, and that I don’t have a whole lot of time for that anymore.
The point is to tell you how I purged myself of my sins against women, and indeed, against myself. Bouvard et Pécuchet, by Gustave Flaubert #ReadIndies.
