The feeling when you read a book that you were looking forward to and it turns out to be eh. Does the world have meaning anymore? What is even the point? </3

I was excited for this book, maybe a bit too excited. The premise is excellent. Imagine literal Satan comes into an atheistic society and wreaks havoc and just ups and leaves. As a non-believer of any sort of anthromorphic or personal God, this sounds like a perfect book to me. I wanted to see how a society grapples with the idea of existence of Satan (and by consequence, a God) and how that alters how you view the world. Especially when that supernatural event is just an anomaly and everything is back to normal? Do you as a society just rationalize it as a collective hallucination? Because how else do you accept the existence of God that cares about you and still make sense of anything happening in the world? And if you do believe the current fucked up world we live in is a trivial blip in context of eternity and therefore, they can perfectly co-exist. Then, wouldn't that breed its own sort of nihilism of not caring about your own trivial blip of a life? And if you do go with the collective hallucination/mass hysteria bit - how do you reconcile hard evidence? And even if you accept this supernatural existence. Now what?

So clearly, I went into the book hoping to explore all these themes and maybe thats my problem. Im disappointed because its not the book I wanted to read. Because instead of exploration of the questions I mentioned, it spends a big chunk of book just talking about a lot of random absurd funny things the devil & co get into, which might have been funny in Russian, but in the English translation it sort of fell flat and I didnt care for that either. To be fair, it does touch up on some of the ideas I was curious about but its so little so glossed over that I'm not sure if it counts.

Im fully aware that I'm hating this book because its not the book I wanted to read which isn't the book's fault. Im also aware how this could have been pretty radical book to write/read in the context of when/where it was written. But the samizdat aspect of it doesn't appeal to me personally in this day and age.

Sigh. So I was left with a bigger gaping hole inside me than when I started the book which is never a good thing.