What is this book about? Well, on the one hand, there is this main idea, which I found interesting and worth exploring. This is the idea that what one find's beautiful might be totally arbitrary, and so what you think is a beautiful thing can be anything but. After all, there are characters that fake things: a master painter who would rather forge old works rather than create his own; a novelist who plagiarises passages from several other sources; and many others. It is great that this book questions our values, and makes one think about what exactly it is that one finds pretty and of value. However, I also think that this objective can be done without spending 950 pages.
Yes, that's the thing, this book is too long. And there's plenty of junk text. There's plenty of uninteresting passages, where I as a reader just didn't see the point why it was there. Seriously, there's too much junk in this book.
Believe me, I tried to access this book. I read analyses of it, reviews, condensed summaries, many other aides, hoping to get closer to what this book was about. But perhaps it was the intention of the author to make this book one of the most challenging books out there. And 950 pages later, I am ready to throw it against the wall. Or maybe use it as toilet paper. I know that English literature scholars might wax poetic about this book, and write oodles of dissertations about it, but really, as a regular reader, this is perhaps one of the worst books I have read in a while. It reminds me of Finnegan's Wake, Gravity's Rainbow, and Infinite Jest, all of which I hated as well.
So there, urgh. Definitely a massively belching urgh. I give this book 1 out of 5 stars.
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