Diary of an Oxygen Thief

This is a strange book. I don't mean it has endearing quirks or interesting oddball ideas – it's strange because the writing is irregular in tone and quality, the pacing erratic, the settings somehow clear yet myopic, rambling. Not bad per se, but definitely adventurous down the wrong fork in the road.

It's a book about a self-loathing and reads like an extended greentext. The author drags you through his demented world as if he's recanting the events to a therapist, complete with the expectation that you'll pick through the narrated wreckage and refrain from kicking him out in disgust.

Not that your disgust should be very visceral, that is. The infantile “beatdowns” delivered in the first half of the novel were so glib as to be almost not worth the space they take up. A simple “I like abusing women – that's the premise” would have been as effective.

As for the entire ending scene...if you were able to cultivate any sort of emotional response from beneath the author's hack affectations (switching to second-person? stripping dialogue? why, to illustrate his mental haze and absurd paranoia? He's sober for god's sake!) and bizarre chain of events, you would probably be left thinking...is that it? Is that all they can muster? He hurts them and they stage weird pantomimes about his manhood and spike his drinks? Why are there so many people just hanging around like villainous stooges, laughing like extras in a comedy?

The narrator is 35 or thereabouts by the time the novel ends, but I'm betting Anonymous is in his early twenties. If you want to real novel about sexist misanthropy read Mishima's Forbidden Colours instead.

This book is amazing. It definitely isn't for everyone; you're going to be exposed to crude and abusive language and experiences being told by the narrator/mc himself. However, if you're able to get past the intentionally disgusting and dislikable mc, you're dropped within a story of pain, suffering, and revenge as you explore power dynamics within abusive and manipulative relationships and how trauma and pain can manifest its way as a projection onto other people; along with the unexpected switches between the predator and the prey.

Definitely a book that requires looking past outward characterization to truly understand and grasp the depth by exploring how such a vile and despicable being attempts to justify himself and redeem himself by expressing his pain when being faced with similar treatment to his own. The irony is what brings this book together.

I first heard of this book close to ten years ago and have been desperate to read it since seeing the opening page posted on Tumblr. I found this book compelling to begin with, I could see the foundations of the narrator being unreliable, narcissistic and a misogynist, well written too. Obviously the point of the novel is that the narrator is a dick and his ‘diary' is a love letter to his shitty behaviour. I put the book down on page 81, the beginning of chapter 3 and the final chapter of the novella (?), once I jumped back in I felt bored and almost robbed up until pages 130-151 which gave a sense of excitement before ending abruptly (he did warn us of this).

I'm torn, in one sense I feel that there could have been so much more yet I fear that could also have ruined it. I'm very much keen to read the following novels and hopefully by the end of the currently trilogy I can return.