Title: "The average reader will find this novel tedious and insufferable"...
Product review: ... says the defensive reviewer for Publishers Weekly, quoted here on Amazon. I like to suppose that I'm a more-than-average reader, at least in terms of grit and perseverance, but I tossed this tedious exercise in self-referential obscurantism after some twenty pages. It reeks of the kind of literary pomposity that saturates the Journal of the Modern Language Association. It's a title to flash at English department cocktail parties at universities in state capitals. And just for a point of reference, I've read Pale Fire, Ulysses, Nobodaddy's Children, A Personal Matter, and other 'difficult' novels. Nobel Prize or not, Claude Simon is no Nabokov.
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