This was a very unsympathetic novel. It's a good one, but one where the main characters are totally unlikeable. Pelletier and Espinoza are two snobs whose intimidating education is no use to them. It can't help them resolve their love triangle with Norton, it doesn't give them an outlet for their emotional turmoil, it can't prevent them giving in to their animal instincts, and it doesn't give them any civilized way of dealing with the one person who dares to call them out as the terrible people they are — the Pakistani taxi driver who they kick nearly to death in an orgiastic frenzy.

So we're left with these two twats who feel like they're entitled to more than they actually deserve and utterly disdain anyone who's impudent enough not to know German or who disagrees with them about their favorite writer. The author seems to be making an attack on academia. Education is petty, worthless and not at all the elevating influence it's supposed to be. Even Archimboldi, the core of Pelletier and Espinoza's scholarship, is this labyrinthine figure surrounded by disturbing dreams and an undercurrent of violence.

The strength of the writing carries this character study of two people whose learning is no defence against their savagery. I found it hard to get invested in these unlikeable characters because their lives were essentially uninteresting. I don't care about the particulars of these people's poxy love triangle, but the novel was written in a very fluid, compelling prose so it was easy to keep reading. I can enjoy unsympathetic novels, but I feel like they need something more than just strength of language to keep the thing afloat. A plot could have helped here, or even just something — anything — in this novel that we might have cared about as much as the characters do.