I always struggle to review translated works – how much of my not understanding should be blamed on meaning getting lost in the transference from one culture to another? In general I enjoyed this novella. Books about struggling writers can go either way for me, but the artifice of this being his writing notebook turned journal served the story well. Mostly, anyway. Sometimes the character would claim to have written something he didn’t, or other characters would claim to have read something that definitely wasn’t included in the published text, and I could never tell whether that was intentional or not. As I say, that could purely be me misreading things, or the English language not being precise enough. But as atmospheric as the story was, I do feel like I missed something important.