I'm ashamed to say that I stopped reading this novel in Chapter 8, the second chapter in the second section, about 175 pages in this edition. The reason? boredom.
The boredom was a problem from the start. The characters are not particularly interesting, there's no plot, and the writing is not impressive. Any one of those is usually enough to keep me interested in a literary novel. The novel seems to be an examination of the homosexual lifestyle of the 1980s. So it's a polemical novel, which means it probably has a point, and that point is probably that promiscuous, unprotected sex is hazardous to your mental and physical health. Well, the author was taking too long to make any point to keep me interested.
Which leaves me asking why this novel even got published. Must have been the male homosexual angle.
Standard disclaimer: I'm nobody, why should you listen to my opinion of this book. It won the Man Booker prize in 2004, so the prize committee liked it. Makes me wonder if it wasn't a type of affirmative action award - reward this novel because of some perceived slight for this class of book in the past, regardless of it's real merit.
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