Diary (or docu-fiction) of a 40 year-old adolescent who imagines he can imitate Proust without effort or style. Poor little rich boy. Turns out that he loves his mother and daughter, admires his father (and his coterie of influential friends and young lovers) and is in awe of his older brother, his parents divorce was hard for him and he took to hedonism. The final pseudo-literary conceit goes plop into an empty pan. Or to put it another way this is a humourless bourgeois Brigitte Jones in drag doing Paris. Despite attaining degree zero of writing its saving grace is that it's a quick and not unpleasant read

The book is an oriental fairy tale for adults, a post-modern flight of fancy Salman in Wonderland tale, with its characters nose-diving into strange worlds of illogic imagination and outrage. Its difficult to see why it provoked so much rage and hatred. It seemed to me a self-consciously worthy obtuse artistic exercise and something like Finnegans Wake, significantly unreadable. Perhaps the anger was directed at something I missed out on, although I suspect it didn't need more than the title to stir intolerance and that anyone capable of getting to grips with the text and finishing it has too much patience and empathy to start burning books or people. For my part I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief right up to the end..

Scintillating dialogue, fine observation, antithetical development, The style is breathtaking. yet I have rarely been so annoyed with the characters depicted in a fiction. Increasingly as the tale unravels they seem to merge into a portrait of an under-employed over-privileged class of snobs, preening around European palaces like ancestral jet-setters with too much time on their hands. Despite this the heroine is complex and compelling and the loose ends of unresolved lives illuminated