Ive just finished Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, which is for about the last 2/3 like something written by Alan Partidge. An incredibly vain, concreted, paranoid man who stays around Europe in the homes of the gentry, in an outsahoude by a pond, until he gets exiled from Gneeva or issued an arrest warrant in France. cos the stuff he wrote was genuinely dangerous to the aristocraic family monarchies of Europe. So he comes across as a paranoid, slightly senile man, but, he was right to be paranoid. He was spied on. But possibly not by some of his bemused friends. Seriously, some of the best 'diary of a nobody' type comedy in Rousseau's constant outrages at receiving a slighlty ambigious letter from a a friend. He's constantly endfing important and lucrative friendships when his prode's been hurt.
But there's more. He confessed to like being dominated spanked in sex, by a 'mother'. He says he cannot help his lusts very often, but that he is mostly virginial and chaste, until he meets the woman who is to sponser his conversion to catholocism. She turens out to be a free love advocate, well that's Rousseau's interpretation, contemporaries may have used different words. But she's apparently the most spiritually moral person. So he gets frustarted and goes masturbating in public near some school girls, then gets cahsed under the sewer. He also confesses to stealing and lying.
