This is an extraordinary book in many ways, some great, some difficult. It is sharply intense from beginning to end, with no letup. I was fairly exhausted by the end. Beautiful prose, but it is written as a runon with no quotation marks, and weird paragraphing. I found this distracting, and I wonder at the author's reasoning. All this combined made it a slog. While I'm OK with having read the book, i'm left dissatisfied.