How I Became Stupid (Martin Page)

A recommendation by Peishan, who lent me her copy. I have been good to it and will return it intact.

Antoine had always felt he was living in dog years. When he was seven he felt about as playful as a man of forty-nine; by eleven he was as disillusioned as an old man of seventy-seven.

Antoine's plight rings true with me. Age twenty-five. Too intelligent for his own good. Too many thoughts. Arcane interests. Socially , for lack of interest A very few good friends. Segregated from those around him by his intelligence. The problem always comes back to being very, very intelligent, and simply not seeing things as others do.

Sigh. All too familiar. And, like Antoine, I, too, have longed to merge with the teeming masses, to become stupid.

So he tries to turn off, destroy, ignore the things that make him stand out. Because I immediately identified with the main character (I'm reluctant to call him the protagonist) it is the story of an alternate Julie, and other ways to approach the percieved problem of difference.

I liked it. The ending might be trite, or it might be sufficient. The book could have gone on another hundred pages, in attempts at coping... could have detailed it out more painfully. In some ways it's more sketch than nightmarish reality. It's well written, but there's not enough length to get truly immersed in the story. Of course, the real Julie has her own ending.