Rezension

Likeable creepy dude

You - Caroline Kepnes

You
von Caroline Kepnes

Bewertet mit 5 Sternen

YOU is the story of Joe Goldberg and his obsession for this woman one day coming into the bookstore he manages. The story is written from his perspective, cynical, misantropic and bibliophile. Joe Goldberg ranks somewhere between admirable for his love of books (at least to me since I like to think as a bibliophile of myself) and an asshole for being so anti all the time about the people around him (well I can identify with that too). But he's kinda right in his view that people these days are rather pretendic than authentic.
Joe values literary people of which he is one but since nobody really seems to read anymore he glorifies himself in a nonmattering way to the rest of the society.
Maybe that is why he sets his eyes onto Guinevere Beck, called Beck. In his view she is beautiful, smart and literary. She embodies what men want. He's obsessed with her right from the beginning. And an obsession he mistakes for love it is indeed which is best described in a sentence of his:"How does my anger with you always softens into love?"

She lies and often she annoys him by being illoyal and a real hypocrite. But he goes on defending her, setting her in a position of being a victim and tries to set things right, even if it means correcting the world around her by killing people close to her that do her no good. She though is a real bitch with boundary and daddy issues and uses men up like toilet paper. When finally Joe and her come together she cheats on him and his anger blows into one final explosion.

I had a fun reading time with this creepy dude Joe and his bitchy object of desire Beck. The characters are so ambivalently written, highlighting their good traits one minute and their bad the other so you are torn between liking and detesting all the time.
One might be annoyed by Caroline Kepnes fondness of many conjunctions. She puts a lot of „and“s into her story but since it's from Joe's perspective I think it is a way of stating his excitement and I think it fits well to him.
The Netflix show differs in some ways from the book, Joe and Beck are much more likeable than they are in the book in my opinion. Also the egoism of wanting Beck all for himself is more clear in the books than it is in the show where Joe mostly tries to keep Beck out of trouble than simply getting rid of the people standing in his way.