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Michael Chapman
I suspect if English is not your first language there are a couple of the stories that will be hard to follow, especially the middle one.
Lisa
It will get easier from part 3 on.
Maud
Damn, thanks for the explanation (and making me feel illitirate) xD Guess I'll skip this one.
George
If your English is that inadequate for the first, 19th-century section, it means a) you can't easily read actual 19th-c. novels and b) things will get somewhat better for you as the novel progresses through the 20th--like what you've been reading--before things get much, much worse as it gets into a quirky 21st and an impressionistically rural language for the post-apocalypse, before the stories and styles continue in reverse order.
My library copy has a handwritten list of vocabulary items with their definitions tucked under the taped-down flap of the dust cover: blithely, schooner, moniker, evince, terraqueous, maroon (v.), pusillaninimity, penurious, brouhaha, paltry, cri de coeur, croupier, and amanuensis. If that list strikes anyone as a vocabulary test they couldn't pass, they will find the book to be difficult--the outer sections more for the vocabulary, the inner more for the distortions. (I knew all but terraqueous, which I got from context along with knowing its Latin roots, but then I'm unusual.)
My library copy has a handwritten list of vocabulary items with their definitions tucked under the taped-down flap of the dust cover: blithely, schooner, moniker, evince, terraqueous, maroon (v.), pusillaninimity, penurious, brouhaha, paltry, cri de coeur, croupier, and amanuensis. If that list strikes anyone as a vocabulary test they couldn't pass, they will find the book to be difficult--the outer sections more for the vocabulary, the inner more for the distortions. (I knew all but terraqueous, which I got from context along with knowing its Latin roots, but then I'm unusual.)
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