The first work I read from this author caught off guard. It was not a book I would have choose by myself, as in my mind I only registered the author as the guy who wrote Lolita and I thought everything he wrote was in the same line.

In some sense, it is, as in Desperation we see the story in the eyes of the one who does something bad and is not a reliable narrator, he even says it himself at the start, so the question lingers: how much of the story is actually as it is told?

Now the premise of the book made me think it was gonna be a very dark and heavy story. There are books I decide not to finish as the stories place very dark shadow upon my soul that haunts me in weird dreams that I can't decide if I should call nightmares or not. It does not even needs to be a violent or cruel story, it's just its overall vibe I guess. And I was afraid this would also be the case for Desperation.

The surprise came in with a very light hearted prologue wrote by the author himself, and a narration full of so many seemingly insignificant things, but never boring. Things didn't even happen up until the last chapters, we were just reminiscing moments and yet everything felt so natural, so good paced and fun. I was very invested in this guy's (an objectively bad guy, we could say) life, in the little things that happened in his days, with his wife and friends. I was laughing because of the way he worded his ideas, I was rushing through the flow of his thoughts and I found myself rooting for him, really wishing things worked up as he wanted. Even when he was doing something bad and selfish, but the whole idea just seemed so fun somehow.

I need to point out the wonderful way un which many dialogues are written, narrating the little actions in between so smooth and naturally that I was amazed at it many times.

I didn't notice much sentences that stuck with me, just one that I took note of in my commonplace, and a short expression mentioned two or three times: pigeon grey, to describe the color of some clothing. I really love pigeons and have used that exact phrasing to refer to a certain color since I was very young. I guess that's why I liked to find it in the book, it felt familiar and made me like this unusual protagonist a lot more, I kinda felt some little conection to him because of it.

I wouldn't say the ending was dissapointing, even when it wasn't what I wanted to happen. But in the rampage of the last chapters I could feel the confusion, the desperation, the frustration of it all coming to that end.

Overall, a really nice book. I only read it because of the book club, it wasn't even in my radar before. But I'm really glad I did as I enjoyed so much, much more than what I anticipated. A pleasant surprise.