Suffocating prose; monologues in spades; hard to understand without footnotes, which made me care less for the plot; I have a feeling English translation is not too good - at some point, accidentally, I switched from a print copy in English to an e-book in Polish and the change in the ease of reading was amazing, something I rarely experience these days. It seems that either the English translation is less flowing than the Polish one, or that the Polish translator took some liberties with the text.