MochaMike

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Your Face Tomorrow--which is not to say it's a title easily recommended. I had the luxury of reading all three volumes one after the other and over a relatively short period of time (I think my enjoyment was enhanced by this opportunity). The individual volumes are not episodic or self-contained. I suspect readers who picked up these volumes as they were translated/published were probably left wondering what what they had got themselves into. The books are not volumes in a series like Harry Potter, the Bourne trilogy, etc. They really only work as a single title (rather like books which were published in volumes in the 1800s); collectively, they form a single work. They also gain by reading determinedly and quickly, if possible, so that ideas, phrases, and events (and there are only a few), so that memories (the narrator's AND the reader's) endure.

What I liked about Your Face Tomorrow is that it's a book (I have to treat it as a single title per above) about reading characters. That's almost all the narrator does, then speculates about, then broods over, reconsiders, reevaluates, and finally acts on. For me, it was a good choice to read after having completed Blakey Vermeule's Why Do We Care about Literary Characters