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One of those books that will crank your reading insecurities off the scale. Here you are, reading what is widely regarded to be a modern classic, and you're scrambling to understand the implications of what's going on. LKs prose is so absorbing you hardly even notice the fact that you can't make heads of anything, but you have that creeping feeling that you are in over your head. Surely the picture will become more clear, right? No, ambiguity seems to be the point here. At one point I felt like LK was speaking directly to me, "Am I getting this through your thick head? Has a light come on there? Anywhere?" No Mr. LK, I'm afraid not.

At one point though, I felt I had it figured out. Our imaginations are the driving force of our actions, our behaviors. "It's nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It's only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of decay...It's a trap, Petrina. And we fall into it every time." At one point the Landlord laments the cobwebs in his storeroom and his inability to locate the spiders responsible. I took the cobwebs to represent the 'network' created by our unrecognized imaginations (aka unlocatable spiders). Pretty sure LK would laugh at my imagination on that one though.

Sounds pretty bleak right? Yes, well, that's just a small taste of the bleakness you encounter in this novel. I don't particularly love reading depressing work like this, particularly when 2020 has provided ample bleakness for a lifetime, but I couldn't help but devour this book. I've never enjoyed a book I didn't understand as much as I did this one. That's gotta say something about LK's talent, right? And I'm still grasping to understand the closing loop of the novel. Intriguing. Confusing. Really excellent stuff.