How I Become Stupid A Novel by Martin Page

"Antoine had always felt he was living in dog years. When he was seven he felt about as playful as a man of forty-nine; by eleven he was disillusioned as an old man of seventy-seven. Now, age twenty five, Antoine was hoping to start taking it easy, and he resolved to shroud his brain in stupidity. He had already realized that intelligence was just the word people used for stupid remarks that were well presented and prettily pronounced, and that intelligence itself was so corrupt, there was often more to be gained from being dumb than from being a sworn intellectual. Intelligence makes you unhappy, lonely, and poor, whereas disguising it offers the possibility of immortality in newsprint and the admiration of those who believe what they read."

At 160 pages -- smallish pages with pretty big type and huge margins -- it certainly wasn’t the length that held me up. The novel is about the size of a collection of Archies comics. The paragraphs are short. The chapters are broken up into little story-chunks.This book has only one drawback: its title, How I Become Stupid, is misleading advertising, since when you finish it you feel much smarter than before.

Twenty-five-year-old Parisian Antoine is sick. The disease? Intelligence. Desperate to find a cure for his overactive brain, Antoine considers alcoholism, suicide, and lobotomy, but none seems quite right for his special needs. A new job, though, is just the ticket. Accepting a position in his high-school friend's brokerage firm, Antoine finds the burdens of consciousness gradually slipping away. This delightfully over-the-top debut novel was a smash when it was published in France in 2001, but will it play as well stateside? After all, the mediocrity that Antoine deems essential to being happy in today's society features many elements common to mainstream American culture. Still, there is always an audience--if not an enormous one--for novels that skewer thick-headed simplicity, and this absurdist comedy mounts a formidable attack. Only an abrupt and puzzlingly optimistic ending detracts from the note of cheerful pessimism that drives the story.

Tortured by the depth of his own intellect, plagued by his overwhelming sense of self-awareness and the moral implications of every action he makes, Antoine, a twenty-five year old Aramaic scholar, is at the end of his rope, with only one viable solution in sight: HE MUST DENOUNCE HIS INTELLIGENCE, by any means necessary . What follows in Martin Page's wickedly funny satire is an odyssey unlike any other as Antoine walks the streets of Paris trying everything from alcoholism to stock-trading to the prescription drug Happyzac in order to lighten the burden of his mind on his soul, and to fulfill his dream of becoming stupid enough to be happily functioning member of society.

In a letter that Antoine has written to his friends to explain his mission of becoming stupid, Page writes:  

“Men simplify the world with words and thoughts, and that’s how they create their certainties; and having certainty is the most potent pleasure in the world, far more potent than money, sex, and power all combined. Renouncing true intelligence is the price we have to pay for having these certainties, and it’s an expenditure that never gets noticed by the bank of our minds.”

Yes, dude, I am so totally with you. :)