A phenomenal book, which took me a while to finish. Legitimate doubts have been raised by some reviewers over the abundant presence of explicitly violent and sexual scenes. Are they really necessary to this story? I am not sure, but I do think that the twisted mind of protagonist Max Aue makes everything in this story so much more real, his sexual dreams, hallucinations, desires in a perverse sense seem to mirror the experiences of violence and gore, the insane dehumanization of death and suffering, in the everyday lifeworld, as if a sick and disturbed society cannot lead to anything else but severe problems in the psyche -which is largely true, I guess.