A book that sticks in your craw.  Sometimes elegant and absurd, often poignant, I still would not call it great.  My Spanish is high school level and I can only assume that much of the vocabulary he used in Spanish (and there was a fair bit) would have shocked the pantalones off my teachers.  To a non-Spanish speaker it ultimately became grating.  The political commentary was a bit heavy-handed, but did serve as a second-layer backdrop for the story.  The footnotes were too reminiscent of David Foster Wallace to feel fresh.  Good, but not great.