I'm now beyond the halfway point and still stuck in the flashbacks, but then again, the flashbacks may be more interesting than the main plotline. Just had a passage about May 1968 in Germany and the beginnings of the feminist movement, which certainly had its moments, and that passage contained some much more nuanced and even thought-inspiring statements about the gender balance in all kinds of professions. So I guess the exaggerated statements earlier were to some extent subjective interpretations by the characters, most of whom aren't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.

But as you can tell I still have an issue with the characters. I'm tired of all the "archetypes", and most of the charactes who at first seem to go beyond that archetype then do something so crazy that it's hard to sympathize with them (like, say, commit pre-meditated murder on your disabled four-year-old). There is now exactly one character who is more or less three-dimensional and hasn't done anything particularly crazy, nor seems likely to. So I guess I'll have to hope that in the end sanity will reign and all the nutcases will kill each other, or something...

I do sort of enjoy reading it, and in fairness it's fulfilling its intended purpose of making me practice my German in a more or less entertaining way well enough. I just don't get - so far, anyway - where all the accolades and enthusiastic blurbs mentioned on the cover come from.