The most frequent thoughts going through my head reading this book were some version or another of "wtf is this?" and "it's gotta get better, right!?" It didn't, and I still do not know what it was.
The book is a collection of "short stories" - which, to be fair, isn't generally my cup of tea anyway, but the blurb intrigued me - and, frankly, I do not understand how this made it through the publication process, even less all the way to a translated publication. I am perfectly willing to jot this down as a failure of understanding on my part, but regardless, I do not understand this book. At all.
The stories all could have some redeeming quality about them, I guess. No concept or idea is too wild that it's unimaginable to conceive of a fleshed out novel-length version (or, frankly, an actual short story - more on that shortly), and a few of the "stories" showed insights into the human condition that I would have loved to read more about. However, as presented in this book, the texts generally just feel like an unholy jumble of scribbles.
My biggest complaint is the ridiculously truncated format of the "short stories." I am very hesitant to even call them that. Sure, one or two short pieces of a page or two in an anthology of a few hundred pages, I'd expect that. However, when all the pieces are that short, no. At that point I feel like it's just a bunch of discarded scraps of writing that someone found when cleaning out a desk. I mean, most newspaper articles are longer than these "short stories" - and I'm not talking exposés here, I'm talking your run-of-the-mill two-minute reads.
Consequently, I was left disappointed by this one.