Wow. Overwhelming and monumental. History, musicology, and "orientalism" encrusting a story of yearning, regret, and the distance between us. I feel like it would take months to look up his references. So I didn't and just enjoyed the tale. ( )

Finished it in Isfahan. Gives you a small impression of persian culture and about love in general (as always ;)). ( )

I have not read as complex, multilayered, and challenging a novel in quite a while. The sleepless musicologist Franz works through his memories and vast knowledge of Vienna, Syria, Iran, music, literature, history, memories, Paris, graveyards, colonialism, otherness, and select trivia while pining over his lost love who is just as much an expert on feminism, women in 19th century Europe traveling to Middle Eastern countries, and Buddhism. Definitely worth reading, but it will take you a while. Prepare yourself for page-long sentences.
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I finished this some time ago, and have been letting it marinate; it certainly isn't for everyone, and it isn't flawless. If you're curious, know that you'll need a high tolerance for curious style (or at least, curious translation); for research novel information dumps ("I thought about this random orientalist nobody's ever heard of, about how he was caught in a sand-storm in 1845 and prayed to the ancient gods of the orient..."); for random pot-shots at Brahms; and for a very unfortunately written love interest (a kind of hyper-intellectualised manic pixie dream girl).

But if you can get through that, this novel is also very, very smart, moving, and just damn interesting. Did you know how interesting Robert Musil's cousin, Alois, was? I had no idea.

Perhaps more important is the novel's approach to the question of The Other, that great French invention of the 20th century. The blurb describes the book as an "ode to Otherness," which is about as accurate as calling To the Lighthouse an ode to the great war. I mean, it's there, sure, but an ode? Rather, it unveils the impossible complications in the concept and the way it's experienced by frankly unhinged Europeans. They have a right to be unhinged, given what 'their' people have done to the world. They wish they were something other than what they are. They try to find something else to be... and end up in grand contradictions. Less an ode to, then, and more an essay on, in the Montaigne tradition. ( )

five stars bc i cried like a freaking baby!! which is an automatic five stars ( )