What in the what?

This was perplexing and not enjoyable. The introduction (which I read last) was illuminating, calling the book an existentialist exploration of the grotesque lives of “neurotics and freaks,” and yes, it was definitely that, but rather than feeling stirred to sympathy and understanding, I felt little more than that I had been snatched from the real world and thrown into a cocktail shaker full of nightmares. The introduction to the 2014 version quotes from a 1978 intro that compares the book to something by Lewis Carroll, and I can see that (the characters are all mad here), and it also recalled what I remember from having hated my way through “Confederacy of Dunces” twenty years ago. I’m definitely not a reader who connects to the constant disorientation of trying to follow characters who act and think in wholly irrational and unrealistic ways. While I bet this made a hell of a splash in subject and style when it was published in 1943(!), it was far, far too far out for me.