“I finally gave this up. I waded through at least three quarters of this hoping so much to like it because I had read his short story Magda Mandella in the New Yorker and thought it brilliant. How can you write a cohesive book about a character who is ever changing? There is nothing to link one episode in his life to the next. Not even any emotional or psychological hang over that changes the character. So the book seemed to me driven not by character but by an idea that was too grand...”

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