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I probably picked a bad time to read this one, as I read it immediately after The Books of Jacob, which I loved, and I found my concentration wavering a lot, perhaps because of the meandering nature of Énard's storytelling and my lack of interest in its narrator Franz Ritter. It is not a bad book, but for me it is trying to be too many things, and doesn't entirely succeed in any of them. The parts that held my attention most were the parts on classical music, a subject Énard knows in sufficient depth for his musicologist narrator to be convincing. I was less interested in the doomed love story that the book is built around, and the parts about perceptions of the East were a little dry for my taste.