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A review by pearloz
Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash
5.0
Oh, Stephen Florida, Stephen Florida, what is happening to your mind? I lived inside this mind for 300ish pages and even I don't know. This was frankly fascinating, a case study, a character study of a vaguely insane, determined and single-minded college wrestler.
He must be lost, right? Like, he's been a wrestler since high school, junior high maybe? And these are the last matches of his life--he can't make a professional career out of it--his studies are clearly a distraction to him--
"There are textbooks for these classes. I couldn’t believe it! Can I be expected to buy all of them, let alone read all of them? Class is a hobby. They cut you all this slack, they keep cutting it year after year. This walking back and forth to buildings, remembering facts and opinions temporarily just to spit them back out and forget forever, it’s what passes for occupation until a match."
This is the kind of mentality you expect from a football, basketball, hockey, even golf or soccer players--someone who could make a profession from this. I think Stephen knows he can't, knows he's at the end of the line, and he hasn't planned for anything else.
So, there's that. He displays a lot of weird, aggressive behavior (pees on other people, on their stuff, buying the gun then throwing it in the lake, his indecision with the journal, stalking the Jazz professor), all without a genuine or even explicit purpose. He is all over the place. I wonder if the sport itself has a role in this: you're training your mind and body every free moment to be aggressive, pin the other person or to escape from their grasp. But these matches are condensed to a few minutes at a time, every week or every other week, what do you do with that energy, with that aggression when you're not actively engaged with the sport?
Plus, his parents are dead, his grandmother is dead. He's not using his real name. This poor kid.
Then there are his...visions? Hallucinations? What are they? The darkness that consumes the gym at the end, the Frogman, was his aunt real?
Also, his forced, to-the-brink celibacy is weird.
I'm curious what he's going to do after this. And, was that Mary Beth at the end?
Also, is he the criminal? I mean, the rapist apparently committed suicide. What about the girl that was shot? Does he have a split personality...the first two sentences of the book, "My mother had two placentas and I was living off both of them. I was supposed to be a twin." Maybe he still is. In his...MIIIIIIINDDDD: https://media3.giphy.com/media/xT0xeJpnrWC4XWblEk/giphy.gif
He must be lost, right? Like, he's been a wrestler since high school, junior high maybe? And these are the last matches of his life--he can't make a professional career out of it--his studies are clearly a distraction to him--
"There are textbooks for these classes. I couldn’t believe it! Can I be expected to buy all of them, let alone read all of them? Class is a hobby. They cut you all this slack, they keep cutting it year after year. This walking back and forth to buildings, remembering facts and opinions temporarily just to spit them back out and forget forever, it’s what passes for occupation until a match."
This is the kind of mentality you expect from a football, basketball, hockey, even golf or soccer players--someone who could make a profession from this. I think Stephen knows he can't, knows he's at the end of the line, and he hasn't planned for anything else.
So, there's that. He displays a lot of weird, aggressive behavior (pees on other people, on their stuff, buying the gun then throwing it in the lake, his indecision with the journal, stalking the Jazz professor), all without a genuine or even explicit purpose. He is all over the place. I wonder if the sport itself has a role in this: you're training your mind and body every free moment to be aggressive, pin the other person or to escape from their grasp. But these matches are condensed to a few minutes at a time, every week or every other week, what do you do with that energy, with that aggression when you're not actively engaged with the sport?
Plus, his parents are dead, his grandmother is dead. He's not using his real name. This poor kid.
Then there are his...visions? Hallucinations? What are they? The darkness that consumes the gym at the end, the Frogman, was his aunt real?
Also, his forced, to-the-brink celibacy is weird.
I'm curious what he's going to do after this. And, was that Mary Beth at the end?
Also, is he the criminal? I mean, the rapist apparently committed suicide. What about the girl that was shot? Does he have a split personality...the first two sentences of the book, "My mother had two placentas and I was living off both of them. I was supposed to be a twin." Maybe he still is. In his...MIIIIIIINDDDD: https://media3.giphy.com/media/xT0xeJpnrWC4XWblEk/giphy.gif