10:04 by Ben Lerner

"What could be more contaminating than this remote control, which had been in how many sullied hands?"

I am completely torn on this one. Is it brilliant, annoying, or both? Probably both. The novel about a writer in New York suffering from a heart condition and also trying to help his best friend out by fathering her baby is verbose in the extreme. You can almost feel yourself trapped inside his head with thoughts flying around. Stream of consciousness writing bombards the page ( or in my case, in this instance, the e-book page - is it still a page?).

There are moments where this in-depth analysis of every move (every sight, every action)really works. Other moments where it seemed, to this reader at any rate, somewhat self-indulgent and annoying. What it does represent for me is, thankfully, another tick off the 1001 novels list - this one having been recently added to the fold in the latest 2018 edition.

Life is fleeting, maybe it is the minutiae that is important. For some reason the scene where the protagonist babysits a kid at the natural history museum and is desperate to use the loo, but not to leave the child, is one of the more memorable moments. That and the trip to the semen collection facility with the focus on hand washing and panic about the potential impact of Viagra. There's something infuriatingly infantile about him, as though he has zero agency and has to be pushed in any direction of note, or perhaps I'm projecting because of the author's first name.

4 out of 5 - don't drug the pigeons.