Purchased at the American Women's Club of Shanghai charity book sale.

What an unusual book! This peculiar tale about the sometimes blurry line between art and reality, obsession and sanity managed to create the dreamlike internal logic of Kafka without ever crossing the line into the realm of the truly impossible. Nothing ever happened that made the reader point a finger and say, ha, that could never happen! (Although many things were clearly very unlikely.) Yet the feel, the tone of the story was somehow surreal. At first, I found this off-putting, but the more I read, the more the story grew on me; once I'd finished it, it popped up in my thoughts for days. It's one of those books where I'd like to meet the author and just ask, where on earth did this come from?

Someone picked this one up at our most recent Shanghai bookcrossers meetup.

I did not find the story or the characters compelling. The setting is well done.