i’ll be honest: i started this book less-than-loving it. like, the narrator-protagonist was so insufferable i had to bribe myself to keep going (i usually love an insufferable narrator…maybe it’s because this one was a man? boo insufferably horny male narrators! you do not charm me!). but by the final story (should i call it a story? final part? final fourth of the whole?) i was won over. 

it’s fun to watch all the threads pull together (or i suppose see the deliberate parallels placed before you) but it feels like it’s more worthwhile to just read the fourth part (around the tatami galaxy in eighty days) and drop the rest. that’s where the heat’s at. you get all the same character development in one part that you get from reading all four parts together. which is to say: protag stays the same in the other three and finally grows in this one, so this one eats.