This actually had more plot that I expected, based on other reviews. The protagonist is negotiating the everyday, years after traumatic events occur. The incursions of memory become surrealistic, for instance as he watches a couple in a playground early on while leaving from a chore. He becomes lost in it and the detail becomes impossible - until you realize he’s not watching anyone, he’s remembering. So it is with his limited interactions with people too. There is a palimpsest moment for every scene. The mundane and the expected same interactions eventually unearth a surrealistic moment that unspools what goes unsaid.

The prose work really does become mesmeric. I can’t say it wasn’t sometimes annoying either though, because as you delve deeper into each scene in its circuitous way, the same information eventually ends up like a parrot. It’s less grating on the page than on audio though, so I’ll stick with that in the future.

It doesn’t feel completely contained, I must say. Reading it as a stand alone story, it feels clipped, because it is. So I am glad I waited for the complete septology and will just mark that book, rather than each trilogy for my reading goals - but it’s nice to have a place where you codify individual thoughts on each part too.