Sébastien Japrisot (1931–2003)

i remember reading this many years ago and really liking it, but I couldn't remember a thing about the plot. So I read it again. It hasn't aged very well. Maybe because there have been so many other stories written now about people who don't know whether or not they are going insane. The pacing is slow. It also felt oddly misogynistic. The main character, Dany, has a lot of self-contempt and is treated poorly by most of the people in the story. It is told in first person, in Dany's POV. A snippet is told in third person, from a side character's POV. The whole last quarter is almost entirely exposition, first person again but in another character's POV. As a reader, I always find a mix of first and third kind of annoying.

Despite these things, I was still interested enough to finish the novel. The nightmarish quality of the narrative as Dany encounters one impossible situation after another and starts to question her sanity--all that is done well. You do have to suspend your disbelief a bit, as Dany makes some pretty questionable choices, but overall an interesting example of what has become almost a trope.… (more)