I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2016)

Saw the movie adaptation by Charile Kaufman and that was deeply strange and then sort of hard to watch. Recently read the screenplay which oddly was way better than my experience with the movie. Now currently reading the novel.

I prefer the novel by leaps and bounds over the movie. The book is stranger, darker, and weirder than the movie. The about 1/2 way through the novel and reflecting on the movie and it is a very good film especially considering the material its taken from. Kaufman totally Kaufmanizes it which is the job of the filmmaker and the book leans towards his storytelling style as well. It fits into the strange-dark reflectivness of Kaufmans characters. Also similar to what he has done in his own novel Antkind. So it is a first that it sort of works better for me this way, for this novel: movie - screenplay - novel. ( )

Um daqueles livros que, quando a gente acaba de ler, já quer imediatamente reler. Amei, se tornou um dos meus preferidos! ( )

I'll be completely honest and say that I just didn't get it. It was unnerving and creepy and made me feel uneasy. The creep factor built very slowly, but in the end it just made no sense. It was confusing and never really went anywhere. ( )

I read this slim volume, which packs the punch of a much bigger novel, while on vacation one summer and it scared me silly! I was sitting in the common area of our cabin in the woods, the black night staring at me through the windows, and had to stop and read something else, deciding this book is best read during the daylight! It is not a horror novel, per se; it’s actually rather difficult to classify. But the suspense toward the end is so intense that I felt like closing my eyes (except that I wouldn’t have been able to read, of course!

A man and a woman, who are dating, are on a drive to a farm in the country (somewhere) so that she can meet his parents. During the drive, all kinds of interesting things are discussed. But we know from the beginning that the woman is “thinking of ending things.” We also know something terrible is going to happen, because between chapters, written in italics, are conversations of unknown people saying things like, "How did this happen? Did anyone see it coming; What a tragedy; Did he bleed out?" So we have in-your-face-foreshadowing that the narrative is leading us to something bad, bad, bad.

After a very strange visit to the man’s parents’ house, on the way back home, with the woman still considering “ending things,” the man makes a stop at his old high school, and then disappears, leaving the woman alone, in the dark, in the snow, in a creepy abandoned building. It was at this point that I had to stop reading, and pick up some light chic lit! I can’t write any more without giving too much away, but be prepared to have your mind blown by the ending. I’ve read the reviews on Amazon, and a number of people didn’t seem to understand what happened at the end and gave it negative reviews. All I can say is that it’s worth a re-read if you aren’t quite sure what happened, and think about the title of the book from a different perspective. Outstanding debut!
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I absolutely hated this book. Now it’s a movie. ( )