i chose this book from the library because of the booker prize stamp, but it ended up being a good companion piece to creation lake

both narrators are deviants from human psychological norms, both are houses divided against themselves, both are women who become entranced by the radical ideas of older male WWII survivors (and they don't fuck those guys), both have short troubling episodes in their lives interleaved with secondhand accounts of the older man's entire depressing life and the weird philosophies he developed as a result, and both are falsely surnamed /smɪθ/ while posing as someone else

case study offers an alternative to the default western BE YOURSELF method of identity construction: accepting that your space in the universe is many parts, many selves. the book even positions this as way to commit deathless suicide--kill your self so you don't kill yourself. (the end of fight club, the beginning of disco elysium, you know how it is.) in case study and creation lake, the characters who can abandon a malfunctioning self will survive. those who can't...