This attempts to be a sweeping family epic of love and loss and the human condition in the most desperate of times, whilst spotlighting events of twentieth century Europe through the lens of the individual. At least, I assume that’s what it’s trying to be.

Instead, it turned out to be an opaque quagmire of fragmentation that frankly felt rather pretentious. Every possible aspect of the book was fragmentary - the overall timeline of the book, the characters we follow and how they all fit together, and the individual timelines within each POV section. For the record, I often enjoy fragmented storytelling, but this failed to come together into a cohesive whole.

The writing was poetic, but so much so that it got in the way of understanding what was actually happening plot-wise. Oblique imagery is great, but not at the expense of comprehension. It also turns out that poetic descriptions of WWI trench warfare really irritate me - I do enjoy beautiful writing, but in this case, call a spade a spade, otherwise it feels a little like sweeping the immensity of the horrors under the rug - and I think that got under my skin and set me up to be vexed by the rest of the book.

A grandiose, overly fragmented multi-generational story that lacked cohesion.