Do I need a tag for Satanism, or can I just file that safely under Christianity? *Ponders.*So, ok, this didn't really work for me. It really should have, it's got so much of the stuff I like - bizarre, multi layered frame story, twisty plot, farce, history, politics and an incredibly unreliable, doomed, obsessed narrator. And yet I was basically bored throughout. I don't know if it was the writing, or the need to keep track of the characters who I honestly couldn't tell apart or the way it takes on history I don't know enough about (Italian unification, for example) to see what he's trying to say there, but I struggled to finish it. The ending too was a particular letdown, since I did want to know the resolution to one central mystery and turned out as a bit of a cop-out, to my tastes. Theres was also a sudden flip into an expectation that we slightly pity the incredibly odious narrator - which i'm fine with, really, only why did it come at the very end? I think I would have enjoyed the book a lot more if the preceeding four hundred pages had been written with the same eye, instead of him just being repetitively slimy.
And, oh, yeah - everything is about the holocaust again.
