Discussion

-All but one of us really liked this book. This tends to be one of those books: you either love it or you hate it.

-There was a lot to discuss from this book. The author goes into graphic description of events that occurred during the narrators’ car accident and what goes on in the burn unit of a hospital - compelling, but not for the squeamish. This is a great read for book clubs as there are so many topics to discuss such as religion, mental health, love, etc.

-We enjoyed the narrator’s occasional use of dark humor, an example being his feelings that there existed a b*tch snake in his spine and the various ways he dealt with internal conflict of which there was quite a lot stemming from his prior life of pornography and reliance on drugs, and his current and continuing struggle with controlling his doses of morphine.

-Engel means angel in German which of course would mean that Marianne is the main character’s angel - she did help to nurse him back to health on more than one occasion.

-Even though this was a love story, there did not seem to be a lot of chemistry between Marianne and the main character. The ending was also a bit odd, one of the characters just decides to swim away….forever.

-The narrator related his own situation to Dante’s inferno, he alluded to the different types of hell that can be felt, both physical and in one’s own mind.