Well this was outstanding, and constructed in a really interesting way. It almost seems like a collection of set pieces, rather than a continual narrative, though of course it is the latter as well. These set pieces are organised as to show the protagonist at different stages of disillusion, and it's all so wasteful, and so hideously, horribly tragic that it's almost comical in places - the series of terribly naive choices that lead to a visiting dignitary to stupefaction in a brothel, for instance, is one the one hand almost grotesquely funny, and yet the humour is undercut by the underlying suspicion that the truly innocent party, the poor student who is only following instructions, will surely be the one to suffer the consequences. And he is, and they are only the first.

Not gonna lie, I've been meaning to read this book for a while, and part of me thought that the invisibility of the title was actual, and speculative - I think I got it confused with the H.G. Wells book of the same title, which I also have been meaning to read and really should get around to. I think it's possible to read this as a story of that kind of invisibility, and how such a phenomenon seeps into existence, but for the most part here the invisibility was metaphorical. It's very much based on the idea, in this case racially-based (although other prejudices could prompt similar stories, I expect) of how society can be so determined to see the expectation rather than the individual that the individual might as well not exist as anything other than a stand-in for stereotype. Which sounds grim, and it is, and this could easily have been an extremely grim book. And in many ways it is an extremely grim book, but there's a very appealing liveliness to it as well, in both plot and language, that keeps the very cutting observations and character work from sinking into dreary misery. It's just an extremely well-written, and very observant piece of work.