Maybe it's due to the fact that I read this while having high fever, but this didn't work for me. At all. Which is unsurprising considering I've liked pretty much nothing of Henry James ever since I tried to get into his writings as a teenager.

The way I see it, Henry James prides himself in having a prose lacking in clarity and conciseness. Now, the idea here (I think) is to do the modernist thing of unfolding a scene to take a look at it from as many different angles as possible. One sentence is not enough to paint a scene, we need two paragraphs per observation it seems.

I don't know if it's me disagreeing with the execution of the latter or if I truly don't lack in enough self-awareness to pretend to like this long-winded stream of meaningless words, but the point is, as much as I like experimentation, I rather read a short story when I can read a short story and a novel when I can read a novel. And this story is, at heart, a short story, exceeding its natural length by almost half of its entire size.

I cannot pretend to have liked this or to find redeeming qualities in it. There surely are, but I'm having a hard time coming to their aid at the end of this review. I just loathed it, all of it.