This novel is written in very interesting and compelling prose, but its characters are hardly worth the effort. The charaters are obsessive bores that can only be compared to day time soap opera characters. After reading through half of this novel, I was so numb from the constant tragedy and melodrama, that I simply did not care what happened to the characters anymore. To make matters worse, the plot is extremely complicated and very difficult to follow, with new characters added every chapter.The most amazing thing about this book is its popularity and that it helped its author win the nobel prize.