This paper does not rate books it has not finished. This notice is the exception, and it is provisional, and I am writing it mostly to work out why I keep stopping.

The narrator is lying. Not unreliably in the ordinary way — the text is constructed so that his account and the events underneath it are separated by a distance you have to measure yourself, with no help offered. Meanwhile the vocabulary is doing something similar: words that look invented are real and archaic, and words that look ordinary are load-bearing in ways I only catch on rereading.

Why I stop

Both attempts before this one died in the same place, around a third through, and I think the reason is that the book asks for a kind of attention I can only give it at the start of an evening. It is not difficult sentence by sentence. It is difficult cumulatively — every page assumes you retained the last forty, and I read too many things at once to reliably do that.

Some books are not hard. They are just intolerant of the way you currently read.— The Editor

Why I keep coming back

Because the passages I do hold are the best prose I have encountered in the genre, and because everyone I trust who has finished it says the same thing in the same slightly evasive tone. That is either a conspiracy or a promise. I have decided to treat it as a promise.

Currently at page 204, which is sixty further than last time. Notes below get updated as I go.