I wish, I wish, I wish in vain ("The Butcher Boy" by Patrick McCabe)

Francie Brady - a small town boy with a bit of a wild imagination, a passion for comic books and John Wayne movies. Via a first person account (with little punctuation), Patrick gives us two stories, one imagined on top of another. This wonderful novel is in fact a stream of consciousness, flowing to-and-fro over the line of sanity. It is a world reflected through a best friend, an alcoholic father, a depressed mother and mean old neighbor Mrs. Nugent. There are priests, three-headed ladies in the market, fish, and so much more.

Love is a battle lost before even begun ("Love Lasts Three Years" by Frédéric Beigbeder)

The title of this blog post is also the first sentence in Beigbeder's autobiographical novel. It beautifully captures the dominant mood of our dear protagonist throughout the story - one of misery, anger, and ultimately, a particular kind of existential angst.

He begins by postulating that love essentially has three stages, each lasting exactly one year: passion, one year of gentleness, and the ultimate year of boredom. He uses the reader as a personal psychoanalyst, and spews his thoughts and feelings out as soon as they come to him. One can't escape realizing the common irrationality of his thoughts, but, as it often goes in these cases, through all the irrationality, we seem to glimpse something that seems true on a more fundamental level.