Unfortunately, I did not like this book. I wanted to, because the premise sounds entertaining enough -- a reanimated corpse wanders around Odessa, and so does the woman who reanimated him -- but the execution was much too plodding and overwrought. The two main characters take ages to almost get somewhere: they rarely act or impact their stories and instead muse their slow way across the pages. It’s rather too stream-of-consciousness for my taste -- the kind designed to show off that the author has ideas, not the one that stimulates immersion or familiarity with characters. I also found it hard to distinguish between the various character voices: their stream of consciousness blended into indistinctiveness. Perhaps I’m too impatient, but I felt that the book was artificially kept running in place.

It did not help that several of the chapters felt entirely pointless to me: alternate chapters flesh out background characters that observe or cause something in the main plot (that was a good thing), only for them to get dropped after their fifteen minutes on the page. And this is a trick that Simon repeats until almost the end: even four fifths into the book, new characters disappear as soon as the next chapter heading shows up.

Perhaps Simon was going for the kind of morose lack-of-purpose fiction that illustrates a post-war or post-soviet zeitgeist. If so, the conceit went over my head. I did not feel this one at all. ( )