Abdalla Essam Essam itibaren برج قلعه، خراسان رضوی، İran
I actually think this novel is brilliant, but I'm not brilliant enough to follow it always. I think it probably deserves more than the 3 stars I gave it. I can understand why some folks might be put off by it. Each chapter is pretty short, and each chapter has a different narrator, so it can be a little hard to follow. And some chapters are essentially a repeat of what you just read, only from *that* narrator's perspective. It's a little more challenging than most novels I read, but I do enjoy occasionally happening upon a place in Istanbul that I have visited!
Still my favourite book. I recently started re-reading my favourite story from it, The Burrow, which so convincingly undermines any sense of stability that it makes me nauseous after too steady a session. So I guess, a love/hate. But if you look past the grisly (In The Penal Colony) and the hopeless (The Burrow, A Hunger Artist, or The Trial (not in this collection)), you find the brilliantly strange (The Metamorphosis, The Bucket Rider), the funny (A Report to an Academy, in which the speaker is, presumably, a monkey who has gained the intelligence to speak) and small gems of quiet contemplation and parable, be they a few pages or just a paragraph. The moment of greatest excitement comes when you read The Judgment early on, and see just how perfect a story it is (even in translation), and realise there's a good ten year's worth more to follow. A dense and varied book. If you like surreal, you should already have read this.
If anything is better than Charlie Huston's Joe Pitt series, I don't know what it is. Charlie Huston is a master storyteller and Joe Pitt is the perfect noir character. I dearly love this series and believe everyone should read it.