by peter carr (england): If you think you don’t have enough work in your life, read this book. It feels like trying to sort out your attic. Obscure prose, hordes of dusty bits and pieces you have to wade through to get to the questionable moral in the far corner of the unlit room. Jumbles of unmemorable names, “clever ” jumps back and forward in time, and a cast of grotesques that add nothing to the story. There’s an old chest in one corner, stuffed with forced references to trans rights that feels as though it is crowbarred in to appeal to “modern” thinkers. only in the last quarter of the book does it start to feel like literature, and by then you will have lost the will to live.
