I somehow feel, still, like I am not quite smart enough to read Delany. That I owe him and his works more brain space and attention than I have to spare on, well, anything these days (with the possible exception of the Gemara).
So much of what he's doing with SF is light years ahead of its time (yes, I know, light years is a measurement of distance, don't @ me) and the way he thinks about his story ends up always escaping any critical framework I would use to think about it. It invites analysis, but also refuses to limit itself to it. It's in conversation with everything and is constantly asking whether it needs to be all genres all at once - speculative fiction, war novel, family drama, mythic quest - and yet it's precisely its "too-much-ness" that makes it so good.
But, as my aforementioned focus is gone, I listened to the book. I think my dizziness and dislocation is due, in part, to the medium that highlights linguistic style and sentence level acrobatics over getting through the words fast enough to construct a picture of the universe Delany is depicting. But given how good a writer he is, it's TOTALLY worth it.