One does not read this novella so much as hunt, with Internet-eyes so proficient now at skimming and scanning, for the linear narrative buried among the random poems, tangents and free form association that make up the bulk of the content. The book is deliciously sized, but the publisher touts its "formally radical nature" which is art code for "confusing" and means that even a short book can seem long when written in such an unconventional manner. Whether the reader will work through confusion is more a reflection of the reader than the book or the writer. Not all reviewers agree with Hilst's stature; Jude D. Russo over at The Harvard Crimson asks, "How long can high literature continue to fetishize the impenetrable? The artistic merits of inscrutability, always questionable, seem by the modern day to have been largely exhausted. The aesthetic seems now to be used primarily as a mask of sophistication for artists who cannot maintain a coherent narrative or who do not have anything worthwhile to say..."
