I read your review and think it was well-written. My problem is that absolutely nothing in the novel seemed remotely interesting to me. South America is a place that I realize has a history, but outside the pre-Columbian cultures nothing there excites me in any fashion. It would be like someone asking if I wanted to see unpainted pottery fragments from Iceland in the 17th Century, or a 1000-page book on the history of a small town in Ohio. It's bland and for some reason it seems cut off from the grand sweep of world history and culture.

Keeping that in mind, I then found the style to be stilted and artificial. It's as though he's trying and failing to be funny in a bittersweet way, which makes the book somewhat painful to read. The characters are largely unsympathetic and they're not really related because it seems like every child is really the result of some sort of adultery or fornication that severs any blood ties with the original family.

For me, the end result was a cold, dead work that I couldn't relate to at any level - I didn't like the setting, the style, the characters or the story. The experience of reading the book was probably about as interesting for me as it would have been if I spent a hundred years in solitude.

As they say, though, de gustibus et coloribus...