Paul > Recent Status Updates

Insanely difficult. I can barely go on

Restarted the book for the third time. Made it to page 50 and now I’m back at page 13. It’s starting to make more sense although it’s a total overload on the mind. Full concentration is needed. So far I’ve got: it’s a book about horses and mud. Despite the confusion and difficulty, it’s quite enjoyable and impressive.

Seems Mr Simon has never heard of punctuation or paragraph breaks. Nevertheless, it’s equal parts mesmerizing and frustrating/confusjng.

My daughter is now about 5 weeks old. I have never been so sleep deprived, nervous system completely fried, hearing phantom cries, meaning she’s gone down for a nap against her will, as always, and I can hear a distant scream of hunger only to realize it’s a hallucination. It’s a lot of work, but there is downtime, so I try to read. This is the absolute worst book to try to complete under these circumstances.

So difficult and dense to an extent that reading is becoming frustrating. This man is clearly a genius but this Ouilipo madness is not very friendly. Perhaps I’m not a talented enough reader. Definitely an impressive underrating but this reader is lost and it’s feeling like a slog. Too many digressions, too little story.

Stalin’s sons are sissies/cross dressers…did not see that coming. I was wondering why this book was burned in protest after publication. This may be a reason?

Ok so they’re at the Bolshoi for the orchestra and it’s filled with excrement and poop water because it’s part of the Moscow sewage system. Audience is hooked up to oxygen tanks and the show goes on, playing music under 20 meters of poop water. This book is actually brilliant

An intensely strange and creative book. Truly impossible to predict where it’s going next.

A difficult book to get into, it takes time to adjust to Ford’s style. It’s not exactly stream of consciousness but it certainly requires attention, dedication, and in my case, a fair amount of re-reading. This is probably the best book I’ve ever read about the disintegration of a romantic relationship. Or I guess they are already on bad terms, so more the aftermath, how to interact when the love is long gone

Pretty good so far

What the f-

So this is clearly a tapestry of lives and voices. I can’t figure out if it’s interconnected except by weirdness. Some laugh out loud moments

What the hell is going on in this book

How does cousin Helen get 300 pages and Mr bonebreaker only gets a lousy 15 pages? What kind of artistic choice …how did that happen?