Like Only Revolutions, this book seems like more of an art piece than a novel. I'm left with the same thought having completed Nabokov's works, wondering if the magnum opi of House of Leaves and Pale Fire were flukes. This is just a 20 page long spooky story spread out across 280 pages with weird spacing, a gimmick with colored quotation marks, and embroidered illustratiions.

The writing style is so pretentious that it’s hard to get past it. By style I don’t mean the silly quote colors and tons of unnecessary space. I mean his actual sentence structure and word choices. There’s just something angst-y and contrived about it. I was constantly reminded that I was reading a book rather than enjoying a story. I think the word choice and stilted sentence structure is worse in Only Revolutions – though that also feels like it's kind of the point in that book so I somehow minded less. It feels accidental/he can't help himself in this book.

There are also some errant leading quotation marks that don't match their colored closing coutnerparts, which wouldn't both me if he didn't also put so much gd emphasis on acute attention to detail (HoL having "no errata", and the errata in OR serving a specific purpose (the code)), these are just lazy mistakes that seem inevitable when you have needlessly color coded quotation marks.

More wordplay on the usage of "All" -> allone, allways. here he uses Manyone in the same way.

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