Every little event in the life of the protagonist, no matter how seemingly innocuous, is ugly, hateful, without a single speck of joy. Sure, there are some similarities between Stoner and No Longer Human- male protagonist narrates a mostly unremarkable life story, both are sad -but where Stoner was a sad book filled with many uplifting moments of passion, love and integrity, Dazai's book is extremely depressing. Really.Īn algorithm recommended this to me because I enjoyed Williams' Stoner and I guess this is an example of how algorithms fail to understand the nuances of book preferences.

Shit man, I kinda well up a little when I think about it. Oh, also I was loaned the book by this really cute girl who prefaced it by saying 'This book reminds me of you.' and once I read and finished it and had a grip on what the whole thing was actually about, I realized that that was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me. which is hella corny and melodramatic anyway, but if you know what it's like, like, being unbearably, unstoppably sad, and trying to put some sort of normal-ish face on it in your day to day life (between intermittent private and regrettable public freakouts probably), then well, this book pretty much covers all that really, really perfectly. Dazai totally nails the impossibly bummed out mindset without being corny or melodramatic, and when you're basically just being a little sad black cloud all walking around, you're super cynical and things like this book are almost impossible to find 'cause your first reaction to everything is just to tear it apart and say it sucks. I probably would have been okay anyway, but this shit helped a ton. No Longer Human was something I read toward the end of that phase. I'm really glad I got out of that frame of mind and I hope I never go back. Grim thoughts all the time, super self destructive, at once alienating and distributing 'cries for help' or whatever you wanna call it.

I spent like three years just crazy depressed.

No longer human audio book