A surreal love story about a relationship between a living woman and a dead man written by Amy Bonnaffons. Yes, you read it right. It’s an interesting plot but a heartbreaking one.
Here’s a quick intro to this story. The protagonist, Rachel is a librarian and her love life wasn’t great so far. She explains, “I have fallen in love with my own daydreams, and then they have gone out into the world and returned to me embodied as men.” But the men disappoint, in the end. “It was not that the men themselves were more real than the daydream,” she says, but rather that the men were too weak to “withstand the daydream’s reality.” Then, at the bus stop, she comes across a sad-looking man, Thomas. She was immediately fascinated by his aura. One day, she follows him onto the bus instead of her own, and their romance begins.
The problem was that Thomas is dead but there’s an “institutional error” which means he is “insufficiently dead” and so he temporarily returned to a body that exactly resembles his own until “the institution” is able to complete the procedure. Sounds like sci-fi? When I read it, it reminded me of the movie, “Her.” (A man who falls in love with a robotic voice). But unlike Her, this novel is deep and funny in so many ways. This philosophical rom-com novel is too weird but too fun to get bored.
