2005 Dolors / 2018 Santi

Sorry. I just didn't get it. ( )

A magnificent read. Wonderfully articulate and fabulous prose and descriptions. I forced myself to read it thoroughly and luxuriate in the wonderful descriptive paragraphs. However, to say the least, an enigmatic book. Three main disconnected stories with a short ending that ties clearly into one of the 3 stories. But I didn't get it! But no matter. ( )

The novel contains two long separate narratives within a framing narrative. These three stories occur in very different times and places (contemporary Norway, late C19 Sweden and late C15 Italy), and there is little surface connection between them, so it is a credit to the quality of the writing that one is drawn in and suffers little from the fairly abrupt endings of the narratives.

A theme is "seriality" -- concerned with the tendency of events to recur separated by time or space. This can be drawn out from the different threads to some extent, but the reader will lose little by just reading it through and not worrying about this. What stands out for me is intellectual content which is lively and readable, just what I'd hope for in a good novel. ( )

I'm a sucker for interlocking narratives, particularly if the transitions are either thought-provoking or clever, or finally fall into place with a resounding thunk. i'm 97% sure that this novels fits that category. The connections have to be discovered, for lack of a better word, it's not a novel that just tells you what it's about in the first couple pages and then goes on to elaborate. But maybe it does, since one of the things in the first story is the idea of circumstance and connection and coincidence and how one event can shape everything after it.

It's rare that i want to re-read a book immediately after finishing it, just to be able to concentrate on some other aspect of it, and I'm not going to do so, for fear of not enjoying it as much, but instead wait a bit. Cleanse the palate, as it were. The book has a weird sort of delicate mustiness to the language and I wonder if that stems from the translated nature of the text, if the flow was different in the original language, or if the original language possesses some flavor i'm entirely unaware of.