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Are you feeling too happy and want to be depressed for a change? Read this book. Or rather, listen to the audiobook narrated by Martin Geeson on Librivox, you'd be dragged into the gloomy and sad life of Tchulkaturin(I'm never going to pronounce a russian name properly :/ ).

The author does a fantastic job of creating a very depressing character with a very depressing story. The character is nowhere near perfect but I couldn't help feeling pitiful towards him and his circumstances, maybe because I could relate to a few incidents personally.

This story is of one Tchulkaturin who is dying of some illness and decides to reminisce about his life, a life that has known no happiness for the most part. And the few times he was brave enough to pursue happiness against his nature, he was beaten to dust most cruelly by fate. The nature of this man, lonely, reserved and introverted, is his ultimate undoing and I can't help but question the fairness of the world and people who cannot accommodate such 'queer' personalities into their lives or believe that such 'queer' people have hearts as warm as any other socially-skilled extrovert.

The character obviously complains about stuff even though he is in the wrong sometimes. Although this might turn some people off from rooting for such characters, being an extreme introvert and socially 'inadept' in real life, I myself have much sympathy and pity for the character. Some people do lead lives without ever knowing happiness and the cruel truth of it is that it is an indirect failure of people and the society around them to not notice their struggle or help them in that struggle, as much as it is the failure of the person in question itself.