I bought this one a long time ago and just now got around to reading it. To be honest, it took a while, and a lot of it was pretty dry. But I really liked the opening 150 pages or so. Unfortunately, it’s nearly 600 pages long, and a lot of that is taken up with the monotonies of life in a war-torn / revolution-torn country, and a lot of people expositing on random philosophical ideals. Not to mention that main characters are often referred to by as many as three different names, and that they keep disappearing and showing up again throughout the novel, only to be smooshed together in dozens of strange and wonderful ways….

Some of the writing and descriptions are beautiful and poetic, very pleasant, but then the conversations are stilted and the action, for pages and pages, goes nowhere, and scenes jump from one to the next with little or no connective tissue… And then there’s the stack of poems at the end, allegedly written by the eponymous main character, and to be perfectly honest, by the time I’d finished, I just didn’t have the patience for them.

Overall, I enjoyed long stretches of it and I think I’m glad I read it. But I wouldn’t necessarily suggest you do the same.

that’s a little hard to get into, because of all the characters and subplots. I saw the movie last year and now I’m reading the book.