This... is bizarre. It's just really very strange, in a creepy, fascinating sort of way. Apparently it was banned in Iran after having caused a number of suicides, a literary equivalent to Gloomy Sunday but substantially weirder. It's all first-person narration, a long descent into insanity and opium addiction, and the two merge together into a maelstrom of repetitive and surrealistic images so that it's hard to tell what's real and what isn't. I can't say that it's a pleasant read, exactly, but it is a compelling one, and I think a lot of that is down to the structure. Particularly the structure on a sentence level: images keep repeating in different ways, but the words are the same. Phrases used over and over, a layering of meaning. I don't think I've read anything quite like it... there are flashes reminiscent of Mervyn Peake and Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, but it's also distinctly different from all these. There's something inescapably wallowing about it, something sticky and glutinous and disturbing. I might have a clearer idea if I were to read it again, but then I don't think I particularly want to read it again...