**spoiler alert** Transcendental reading, never boring, but heavily metaphorical. Awash in literary devices but never weighed down by them. It takes a**spoiler alert** Transcendental reading, never boring, but heavily metaphorical. Awash in literary devices but never weighed down by them. It takes a certain kind of person to like this novel, and if you don't that's perfectly understandable. I see why some reviews call it intentionally confusing; a masturbatory, creative writing exercise with an undercurrent of misogyny (a man's bitter, entitled treatise against a woman who left him). I was overwhelmed by too many two-dimensional characters all written in the same voice who relentlessly wound themselves with paper cuts, bee stings, and hot pokers.
But I sense that the author is keenly aware of this negative interpretation and the reader's frustrations. The constant mention of Napoleon insinuates the smallness of an author writing a big book about the pain of lost love. To conquer another people against their will (textually) is the only way to maintain his life that spins out of control. And sure, what a pathetic motivation for a novel, right? But the effort is also humanizing and truthful. The colonial "war" is what makes the entire novel work, I think. Somehow all the world's history of colonization, miscegenation, and racial betrayal ("Malinche"...ouch) is brilliantly woven into one guy's break-up with his girlfriend. The story won't reveal this to you at first. So eventually, in the last 100 pages, I came to empathize with the author's sadness over a woman who left him (for a white man), and understand his desire to create and control something else to make the sadness go away. ...more
Just no. No, no, no. This book took me 6 months to finish. I can't BELIEVE I stuck with it that long. So you can't say I didn't try to like it. In theJust no. No, no, no. This book took me 6 months to finish. I can't BELIEVE I stuck with it that long. So you can't say I didn't try to like it. In the end the only thing I enjoyed was the city itself. The characters: all of them could have died of orchid wounds and I wouldn't have cared. ...more
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