Just finished reading this novel. But I didn't understand

>>8654720
Also, what were the most beautiful passages from the book?

>One day when I was six years old, I came to know a truth, a hard truth that would stay with me for the rest of my life. I was in the farmhouse alone and I happened to look out the screen door, where I saw our cat. She was crouching close to the ground and utterly still, except for her tail, which switched like a metronome, side to side. I could see the cat’s muscles roiling beneath her blue-gray fur. Her eyes shone fire upon a mouse that sat roughly a foot in front of her. Neither animal moved and I didn’t either, but I could feel my heart beating. The standoff ended when the mouse finally moved and the cat caught it with a swift, clawless swat. The mouse stopped. After a brief moment of stillness, the mouse moved again, the cat met it with another swipe, and once again the mouse stopped. This happened many times. Then the mouse began to back up slowly, and the cat went into a deep crouch and then a mighty pounce. The mouse was trapped between the cat’s two paws. It struggled to get away but its efforts were futile, and the cat brought its face close to the mouse, who, in a desperate bid for freedom, bit the cat’s nose. The cat’s face momentarily recoiled in astonishment. Then the cat’s green eyes flashed black like the wing of a crow and her teeth tore into the mouse, and I could hear the tiny bones breaking as the cat’s neck swung from side to side until the mouse was still and limp, but the cat’s neck continued to swing. Then the cat slung the dead mouse into the short hay and strolled away. This last moment was what surprised and frightened me the most. This whole endeavor had nothing to do with food. And this is when I learned that hardscrabble truth: There is a difference between what a thing is and what it appears to be. A thing can appear to be content and happy as it lies with you so close that you feel its purr in your belly. And if you don’t look through the screen door and out into the world, you might never realize that the thing you think you know and love is another, more dangerous thing altogether.

>From there, we all went to the graveyard. The day was bright and clean and the cool autumn air filled my lungs and made me feel healthy. A time passed and then the hearse showed up. The pallbearers were all big men and they carried the tiny white coffin as if it was very heavy, although it could not have weighed more than eighty or ninety pounds.
>There was a small hole in the ground and some dirt beside it. We stood in a circle and the sad-faced pastor said some things in Latin and then we formed a line. The sun was directly overhead and made the tiny white coffin ever so bright, and I took a handful of dirt and flung it down on top. Then it was the next guy’s turn.
>Afterward, I walked back alone down a long blacktop road, and it was cold, and in the sky there were white clouds, and they all looked like white clouds and nothing else.

>>8654746
wait a second did Norm write a piece of actual literature? what the fuck?

>>8654777
Yes, it's like Pale Fire, Of Mice and Men, Fear and Loathing, Tristam Shandy, The Man who was Thursday and Tolstoy's childhood trilogy. It's fictional.

>>8654777
Also it shits on modern writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, which is fun.

>>8654720
Adam Egret please take your goblin ear and leave

>>8655171
Fuck off, kike.

>>8655195
Fuck you, you fucking holocaust-denying faggot! Don't you have a bridge to be under you fucking degenerate alcoholic sperm burglar?

>>8654746
Are people pretending this is good or is /lit/ shit now or what

>>8655245
Let me tell you something about gas chambers and how their color should be affected by hypothetical zyklon b usage. Let me pull out some literature for you to read, hold on...

>>8655277
It's beautifully written and fucking hilarious.

Best book of 2016, by far. Better written than 99% of the shit /lit/ talks about written after 1960s, and I'm being completely unironic here.

And it shits on /lit/s favourite writers.

>>8655293
That’s why, within the jail, Rocco’s name was spoken in hushed tones. He was a raper’s raper. He was staying right here in prison, he told me, because inside he had the necessary skills to command respect and prestige, but outside he was a nobody. I was no longer his lawyer, just another prisoner, and if I knew what was good for me I’d better start raping.

Now, I’d never raped anybody before, and in the free world I had worn that fact as a badge of honor, mentioning it proudly and loudly at dinner parties and social events. Folks admired me for it.

“Say what you will about old Norm,” my friends would often say, “but he won’t rape you!” Every time I heard that, it’d make me feel good inside, like a warm shot of whiskey. But here in the penitentiary, the rules had been turned upside down.

I wanted to fit in, but the problem was that I didn’t care much for sex with men. I liked men fine when it came to watching football games with them, and eating Cheetos, and playing videogames, but when it came to having sex with them, I’d just had to grin and bear it.

“You’ve got it all wrong, Norm,” Rocco explained. “Rape has nothing to do with sex. It’s all about power, buddy.”

I gotta admit, when Rocco first told me that, I thought it was about the damnfoolest thing a man could say. But the more I chewed on it, the more sense it started to make. Rape was all about making the other guy feel small; then I’d look big and strong beside him. I’d done similar things in the free world plenty—spraying a handful of quarters onto a busy thoroughfare and laughing as the homeless bums dodged cars and trucks to earn their supper. I had always felt really big inside when I’d done that. And, apparently, that’s what raping a fellow in prison felt like, or so Rocco told me.

So I made up my mind then and there that as soon as the opportunity availed itself I would take ungentlemanly advantage of some hapless prisoner. I got my opportunity while I was working one night in the machine shop and I looked over and there stood Marvin Adelman. Marvin was doing a five-year bid for securities and exchange fraud. He had large black glasses, thinning gray hair, and whiskers that made him look just like a rodent with large black glasses.

I shouted at him loud, so all my fellow inmates could hear. “Hey, Adelman, I’m going to rape you the same way you raped the people who invested all their money in your Ponzi schemes. The only difference is, whereas you raped them in a metaphorical sense, I’m setting out to—” I stopped my speech. Marvin had fled. I had made the biggest mistake of the novice raper: I had made my intentions known.

The whole yard laughed at me as I turned beet red. I took off in an embarrassed rage, determined that I would rape Marvin Adelman before the sun touched the horizon.

>>8655315
It took a while, but I finally located Marvin cowering behind a belt sander. This was a good sign. Whenever a guy is cowering, you know that you have the upper hand. I started chasing him, but he was fast and elusive, like a jackrabbit wearing large black glasses. I was dog-tired and gasping heavily when I finally got him cornered, and as I made a final lunge toward him I tripped and hit my head on a belt sander.

I don’t know how long I was out, but when I regained consciousness the first thing I heard was the laughter. I looked around and all the prisoners were beside themselves with delight, laughing and poking each other in the sides. The only man who was not laughing was Rocco. He sat in a chair way in the back, but he was close enough that I could see the disappointment in his eyes. I couldn’t make sense of any of it, but then I turned around and saw what had the boys in the black-and-white pajamas convulsing in this mass paroxysm of mirth.

There, behind me, was Marvin Edelman—all hundred thirty pounds of him—and what do you suppose Marvin was doing that was so funny that he had everybody busting a gut? Well, he was raping me, that’s what! He was raping the hell out of me. You know, I had never understood the concept of irony before, but I guessed that this was it, all right, and I was not a fan. “Get the hell off me, Adelman, and enough with the raping!” I said.

“Why should I?”

“Yeah, why should he?” the prisoners repeated as one.

I was starting to feel pretty powerless, so I had to think and think fast.

“I’ll tell you why,” I said. “Because if you don’t cut out the raping, and pronto, I’ll go to my cell and get my handmade knife and that’ll be the end of you.” (I made a mental note to fashion myself a handmade knife when I got back to my cell.) “But I’m willing to make a deal with you, Adelman. We are both civilized men.

You quit raping me right now and there’ll be no hard feelings. And you won’t see a reprisal rape outta me either, I promise you that.”
Marvin stopped his raping for a minute, and I could see by the look on his face he was turning the offer over in his mind. “I don’t know,” he said. “I kinda like this feeling of power.”

“But rape isn’t about power, Marvin. You’ve got it all wrong. It’s about sex, don’t you see?”

I could tell this was confusing Marvin, and that gave me just the time I needed. I slammed my elbow into his spectacles.

“I’m blind, I’m blind!” he screamed.

“And you’re raped as well!” I said triumphantly, and I began my savage reprisal rape of Marvin Adelman, prisoner 6020311.

“Now who’s raping whom?” I asked.

Adelman must have thought this was a rhetorical question, because he just whimpered and cried and my non-rhetorical question hung awkwardly in the air, unanswered, before I proclaimed, “I’m raping you, that’s who.”

Can't believe how badly Rodney Dangerfield was treated by everyone, no wonder he turned to comedy to cope.

>>8654746
posting part of the last chapter, so spoilers:

Well this is the last part of the whole book. my secretary went and got himself killed. i got so mad at adam eget cause he was supposed to be guarding him but was sleeping instead so i find a bat and start hitting him with it and he gets down on his hands and knees to protect himself and thats when he finds it. norm, this is your memoir. i found it. i found it. and im happy so i say read it to be sure and adam eget opens it and thats when theres a knock at the door and me and adam eget get quiet and scared cause we know its those goons that work for the fat man with the artificial hair.[/spoiler/

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>>8654720
Would Norm's ghostwriter be considered a large man?

>>8654720
Norm is my favorite stand up comedian and I can't wait to read this. Glad /lit/ knows what is up.