Too much like White Nights by Dostoyevsky to be original to me. I think this kind of fiction with its yearning and existential undertones can only really be enjoyed in its novelty. This time I simply found the lead miserable, inert, and the cliché of the man who has one poor experience with a woman and then spends the rest of his life in misery is overdone to the point of exhaustion. Whilst the latent political comments on the Ottoman Empire as the sick man of Europe, queer theory, and regard of gender dynamics on relationships in a Patriarchal society were interesting, and original for the period, in a modern context they are not enough to redeem the text for ultimately falling into such trite clichés. I really wanted to love this, but I did not.