It had such great reviews, and was supposed to be amazing, but I couldn't get into this book as much as I felt I should have. Some of the individual chapters were interesting, but they didn't fit into a story that I was particularly interested in, or felt compelled by.
I seem to have read a series of these "beautiful" books that have highly symbolic characters and story lines that don't mean much to me. The characters in this book were so abstract, and I didn't understand the role of several of them.
Interesting, though, I had no idea the Czech soldiers played a role in the Russian Revolution, or the existence of the castrate groups. Some of the conflicting groups in this book felt a bit over the top.
Took me a long time to read.

Usually I hate reading books with 'international best seller' plastered all over the front (I know I'm a snob), but I just didn't care with this one. It is so beautiful, so cruel, so slow - you get to see every side of a moment with complete lucidity throughout. My only main gripe is that I think it was over-egging the pudding a bit to have the cannibal AND the castrate AND the communists - had the communists not been in it it still would have served as an ample reflection of the horrors of that kind of extremism. But, still, amazing amazing. So well-written. So affecting.