At first I thought this book was unbearably bleak and depressing, but eventually I got over that. Overall I thought the story was interesting, and there's some good social commentary. My favorite part, however, was when I reached the very end: I felt as if I were left with a mystery and started rereading the frame story letters at the beginning and different sections of the novel to see if I could piece together the things that we aren't told. Kerrigan's translation is decent. Perhaps in Spanish the narrator has a distinctive rough, uneducated Spanish peasant voice which was hard to recreate in English but that doesn't bug me so much--you still get a clear picture of his character from the story.

3/1/2026