This book was a first for me. The prose is masterful. Mujila is able to effortlessly use language to alternately create monotony, freneticism, and musicality. 

He deftly crafts characters and situations that show the arrested development of the people and the society within the City-State (and by extension the DRC). 

The characters are adroitly rendered metaphors, e.g, the failure of intellectual idealism to adapt to the realities of post-revolutionary societies (Lucien) and the persistence of violence and nihilism in the ideology of the soldiers in the aftermath of war (Requiem). 

I think Mujila accomplished everything he intended to do when he set out to write this novel, and he did it well. 

Despite all of that, I really disliked this novel. I would not have finished it if it weren’t part of a reading challenge. I don’t know how to reconcile those two realities. I think many people will find a lot to like here, and I wish I were one of them.

 I don’t know that there’s much of a conclusion here, but I wanted to document the first time I thought a novel was both almost perfectly executed and almost completely unreadable (for me).