I put this off for a long time because everyone kept telling me it was “structurally ambitious,” which is the kind of phrase that usually means a book is going to make me do homework. It does make you do homework, a little, but it’s the good kind, the kind where you’re dizzy in a satisfying way by the end rather than just tired. Six narrators, six time periods, and the whole thing nests like a Russian doll, half the stories cut off mid sentence and picked back up two hundred pages later once you’ve half forgotten the cliffhanger. That’s the part I want to talk about, actually, more than the reincarnation angle everyone flags first. Mitchell interrupts you on purpose. The Pacific journal breaks off with a literal torn page, and by the time you get back to Adam Ewing you’ve read four other books’ worth of voice and have to reacclimate to his stiffness all over again.

The one section that nearly lost me was Sloosha’s Crossing, the post apocalyptic pidgin one near the center. I’m not a huge fan of dialect on the page generally, it slows my eye down in a way that isn’t always earning its keep, and I’ll admit I skimmed a paragraph or two before forcing myself back to full attention. Worth it. The Luisa Rey thriller section is the one I’d hand to someone skeptical of the whole project, since it reads fastest and still carries the book’s real questions about power repeating itself down the centuries.

Second read is apparently where this book actually clicks into place, now that I know how the sextet resolves, and I believe it, I’ve already caught myself flipping back to the Sonmi-451 chapters to reread a line I know is doing more work than it looked like the first time.