"This is one of the most bizarre, exhilarating, strange, intense books I've ever read. I mean all of this in a good way. The book's chapters are fractured looks at an even more fractured family. The book feels less like a story about them and more like a lived experience inside their psyche. Each chapter reads like a short experimental film about each character. They are beautiful, poetic abstractions on the human condition."

"This still feels like one of the most radical books I’ve ever read. It’s considered to be the first existential novel. It’s the memoir of a nameless retired civil servant in Saint Petersburg who’s staging a protest against rational thought and says things like “Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human.”"