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I generally get along with metafiction, but all through this work, I wondered about its uses here and waited for a payoff that didn’t arrive. If anything, the metafictional aspects thwarted suspense and revelation, and I doubt that was the author’s intent. The doubling of certain characters didn’t feel particularly useful either. But that may be because I get aggravated (and bored) with characters who fall in love, immediately, with another’s beauty, and think about it incessantly. Because of the doubling of the characters, I was exasperated (and bored) twice as much over this aspect.

One of the blurbs describes this as a “political novel�� and that may be my other issue. I realize all novels are political in some way, but I don’t engage easily with the political over the personal in novels, especially when the political is fanaticism, even if a work is so-called presenting both sides. I understand this is not a story of “reality”—the way Ka writes his poems proves that. I recognize the novel’s absurdity—it felt Kafkaesque in the beginning; I also thought of Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled—but that also isn’t always to my taste and likely has a lot to do with why I didn’t fully engage with this book.

The writing itself is fine and that’s why I was able to keep reading. I noted the several references to Russian writers and their novels (that might be the most fun I had reading this), but I don’t know why they’re there.