I read this is Finnish but it doesn’t matter – it’s still the same book. I picked up this book without any expectations, in fact I had no idea what the book was about, but the name and the small pictures intrigued me so much that I had to give it a try.

I didn’t think the book was depressing at all. Surely it depicts a grim world of today; a humankind raised and living in a vacuum. And it’s all true, our generation is cursed with the never-ending quest to find some sort of a meaning and a place in this world. Everybody wants to more or less fit in, and we feel lost and scattered whenever the emptiness inside grows too big.

I’m not saying religion is an answer, I’m an atheist and feel no need to replace that with anything supernatural. That doesn’t change the fact that there really is a vacuum of faith, and the short stories in this book cleverly observe this emptiness, what it means to a human being and how it is present in even the most ordinary of lives.

For me, there was nothing in the book I hadn’t already thought through at some point in my life, and perhaps that was one of the reasons the stories didn’t depress me. I’ve come to terms with my emptiness, and these observations in the book just confirmed me that other people go through same kind of feelings – a completely different thing is, how they process them and if they’re able to accept them and move on. Though perhaps that’s exactly the message of the book; we go through these kind of thoughts, feel empty and lost, and still discard such thoughts and continue as nothing has happened, even though everything has changed. This is how life is in the centre of the vacuum.

I read this book last week. Interesting observations, but depressing as hell.

Douglas Coupland – Life After God