- Title:
- Memoirs of an Invisible Man
- By:
- H.F. Saint
- Pages:
- 396
- Rating:
- 4
When a freak accident leaves stock analyst Nick Halloway completely invisible, he is pursued by intelligence agents, amasses a fortune, and battles against desperate loneliness
“Somehow, unwittingly, incredibly, I had become part of a live sex act performed before a hostile, disapproving audience. I felt exposed, anxious, and ashamed.”
This, so early in the book, makes you wonder jus where this title is going. But as you look back, seeing that really, it’s the last public appearance of our hero in any meaningful way, there’s a touch of … what? Sympathy, I suppose.
“I was becoming a sack of vomit and fecal matter. I suppose, on reflection, that that is what I had always been, but nature had not formerly imposed this aspect of the human condition quite so vividly upon me. The nasty facts had been discreetly enveloped in opaque flesh. Now I was to be a transparent sack of vomit and fecal matter. I cannot begin to tell you how distasteful it was.”
A shade under twenty per cent of the book, about fifty minutes of my reading time, was devoted to the immediate aftermath of Nick’s disappearance. This was, for me, perhaps the most electrifying part. The author does explore the implications of invisibility well throughout, and yet that hour of drama was my highlight.
IT’s wordy, in a strange way; not immediately obvious it’s over twenty-five years old, and written in an almost bemusedly whimsical style. For all that, I dug in and really liked it.