Is a book that few people would enjoy, so I'd be selective in who to recommend it to, sadly, perhaps the friend of mine who would most have enjoyed it is someone who is not here anymore (sadly doesn't cut it, in English or Spanish, words fall short when speaking of loosing someone). But anyway, coming back to the book, two philosophy scholars, talk... no wait only one of them talks... no, he doesn't talk, he attacks, relentlessly the other one, sometimes himself, and sometimes the world itself, but mainly attacks the other one with such deadpan resignation that is hard to even call it sarcasm or cynism. And we know of this because the book is told from the perspective of the recipient of all this diatribe. They are, of course, best friends.
Oh, there is some minimal plot in the book: one of them has a problem with humidity on the walls of his apartment. A weird, short, and original book. My favourite passages pasted below
"My idiocy is theological, W. tells me. It is vast, omnipresent; not simply a lack (of intelligence, say), though neither is it entirely tangible or real. We picture it as a vast, dense cloud, and then as a storm, flashing with lightning. It can be quite magnificent, he says. It can shock and awe, W. says. I am that I am, says W., that’s all it says"
"One writes neither for the true proletarian, occupied elsewhere, and very well occupied, nor for the true bourgeois starved of goods, and who have not the ears. One writes for the disadjusted, neither proletarian nor bourgeois; that is to say, for one’s friends, and less for the friends one has than for the innumerable unknown people who have the same life as us, who roughly and crudely understand the same things, are able to accept or must refuse the same, and who are in the same state of powerlessness and official silence."
"My idiocy is theological, W. tells me. It is vast, omnipresent; not simply a lack (of intelligence, say), though neither is it entirely tangible or real. We picture it as a vast, dense cloud, and then as a storm, flashing with lightning. It can be quite magnificent, he says. It can shock and awe, W. says. I am that I am, says W., that’s all it says"
"One writes neither for the true proletarian, occupied elsewhere, and very well occupied, nor for the true bourgeois starved of goods, and who have not the ears. One writes for the disadjusted, neither proletarian nor bourgeois; that is to say, for one’s friends, and less for the friends one has than for the innumerable unknown people who have the same life as us, who roughly and crudely understand the same things, are able to accept or must refuse the same, and who are in the same state of powerlessness and official silence."
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