Metro 2035(book) Review/Thoughts

I'm not sure why but this one was pretty hard to get through, I still enjoyed it and I'm glad that Artyom was the focus this time around. But maybe it was just the prose or the translation, but something didn't really click with me. Sometimes it just wasn't very clear who was speaking either, until you read a few lines further. Not sure if that was a design choice, or me being stupid, or translation.

With how dark these stories can get sometimes I have to be in the right mindset to read them and I think I may have chosen this book at the wrong time, after every chapter I usually came away feeling a little sad, but I think that was the intent, the metro just seems so horrible and awful and I can feel Artyom's desperation to be free of it all. Even though there are hardly any supernatural elements in this book, no ghosts in the pipes, no darkness of the tunnels calling, and no horrible monsters waiting to snatch you away, the humans fill that void and are just as awful. It all feels so oppressive and claustrophobic. Even with none of the monsters lurking about, leaving your station is bound to get you killed or enslaved by one of the mirrorlike factions.

Everytime Artyom even gets a shred of hope it is almost immediately ripped away violently, or by those he trusts the most. From Artyom being enslaved, to being forced to fight against other slaves, and being helped by Sasha, to Savelil taking him to the radio station, it all ends up being so pointless and sad, going through all of that trauma just to find out so many people already knew the world was fine and just kept it hidden from him instead of bringing him into the loop, and at the very end of it after trying to let everyone know they could go back to the surface, no one cared. Savelil and Letyaga dying, Homer and Lyhoka leaving him, his stepfather choosing to stay in Expedition. The only one choosing to go with him being Anya, who after everything maybe should have left him too.

I did enjoy the open ending, it was at least a little bit hopeful, I like to think they made it somewhere and were able to live happily.