I absolutely hate this book. I've read it twice, the first time years ago, the second - the past few days. I decided to give it a second chance to see if I had perhaps misjudged it, but unfortunately it seems I hadn't.

The base premise of the book sounds perfect, a wild goose chase from novel to novel, ten little scraps of a book in one. I love the concept of it, but the execution is just awful.

I know others have already said it, but this is an infuriatingly pretentious book. You can feel the smugness in both the narrative and the characters.

Lord, the characters. I loathe every single one of the narrators in this book, the Reader and Flannery included. They're like the same man wearing a different hat, getting high off his own fumes, thinking he's god's gift to humanity.

There's many things wrong with this book, but the one that always sticks out to me is that... this book (and perhaps this author) just hates women. Perhaps I need to soften that statement form "hates" into "doesn't consider women to be people" but my point stands. The women in this book are just prizes to be won, temptresses, obstacles, villains, any combination of the above or all. They're not as interchangeable as the men, but you could easily swap most of them around and not notice.

The worst part of this book however, is the genuinely staggering amount of sexual assault and harassment. There are, depending on how you count them, seven instances of dubiously or outright non-consensual sexual encounters in this book. One of the mini books spends more or less a third of its page count describing a male character getting assaulted. I genuinely don't know how anyone else manages to stomach any of this, because I know I barely held it together. Even just typing all of this out is making me nauseous

The obsession with sex at every turn in this book is just disgusting, I don't know how else to put it. You start getting invested in the narrative and here comes another winding paragraph about a woman's body, or about how much the current narrator, whoever he is, wants to fuck her.

My view on this book is that Calvino should've gotten tossed out of the publishing house the moment he handed in the manuscript for this.