White Nights

Tedious and hard to get through. Endless, endless paragraphs of barely understandable ravings.

The protagonist is seemingly a mentally unwell man, but it is not clear if this is meant to be so, or if the time and place it was written is so far removed from the present that it just seems so, or if something has just been lost in translation.

Sometimes in the main character’s endless paragraphs, it feels like he is saying something very relatable to me - about how the best years have been wasted in isolation, about how life becomes so eventless that you mark the anniversaries of such trivial things. But the context it is in is of him just saying all this at some random person, who reacts in a way utterly alien to me, that it is hard to get too taken by it.

You sometimes get the sense that very universal, comprehensible feelings are being expressed, but it’s all so formulaic and unbelievable that you only register it intellectually.

It is just a crude, incel fantasy - man comforts woman while she weeps after an undeserving man, and eventually he is nice enough to her that she falls for him.