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Not as compelling as the Third Policeman but a very good read overall. I find it a bit odd that this book appears on so many "top ___ books you must read" list but I guess it's more arty than Third Policeman so it probably appeals to the James Joyce / Thomas Pynchon crowd more.

I've read this book some dozen times through. It's the very first book I have ever read that as soon as I finished reading it the first time, I flipped back to page one.

I know the writing style isn't for everyone, in many ways it's more like long-form free verse than "proper fiction". That said, if it resonates with you, it will really resonate with you because it has been set free from some of the formalist constraints that allow us to imagine we are simply reading a story and not immersed in a vision.

Post-apocalyptic scenarios are very personally meaningful to me for a variety of reasons, including being raised by a hippie survivalist through the 80s dream of nuclear holocaust, and the resulting recurring nightmares throughout my entire life I learned to channel into lucid dreaming. The apocalypse is my personal inner playground. I can't ever change the setting, though. Something terrible has happened, and nobody really knows what.

All this to say that I get the dark, nasty world, and I delight in it. Your mileage may vary. As far as the writing goes, it's no airport book so if that's what you were hoping for what with the (terrible) movie adaptation and all, you'd better go read something else because this will probably not please you in the least.

The entire point of a dual language version is to compare the text. I realize you can't do facing pages on a Kindle but maybe alternating paragraphs would be good. What did this publisher do? The ENTIRE German version of each story, then the ENTIRE English version. The only reason I give it 2 stars is that it's still Kafka. Whoever thought this would be a good adaptation to the Kindle platform should be fired, and I regret spending my money on it. Dover is a really good print version publisher, and I have many of their books including a dual-language edition of some French poems - I expected more and am quite peeved. Save your money and dig up a used copy in the print version.