"This is what I don't have:

- Plans

- Enthusiasm

- A girlfriend

- The sense that things fit together and that everything will be all right in the end

- A winning personality

- A watch"

When the narrator of Erlend Loe's Naive. Super takes stock of his life, the bad far outweighs the good. Aged twenty-five, he is struggling to find any meaning in his life, and making a list of what he's lacking only draws further attention to his perceived failings. Yet making lists is one of the things he's best at. From a literary perspective, it's a simple device generally employed to quickly convey pertinent information about a character, and in the hands of Loe it is undeniably highly effective. For example, it's hard to read the list the narrator makes of things that used to excite him as a child and not want to write up your own; however, considering his depression causes him to revert to to something akin to a childlike state (his greatest pleasure in life becomes the time he spends playing with a ball and a hammer-and-peg toy), said list becomes incredibly poignant. Halfway through the novel, I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops.