I had to take two long breaks while reading this series because it got into my head in the worst way, in ways I still find inexplicable. It does a lot of things that I find quite remarkable and impressive, but I think its length dilutes the impact of the project. It is a 1700-page novel, and despite finding it eminently (again, inexplicably) readable and truly impressive in its scope, I don't think it ultimately earns the pagecount. What's most remarkable about this series is that it is so readable. I don't think it should be. I can't identify what, in craft, makes it so; in Anglophone literature I would find this both impenetrable and intolerable. It is one of those magic books, four times, that can't be definitively analyzed by one person, one time, through one lens. I guess that makes it a successful literary novel. I'm circling around to impressed again? I had hoped my feelings would clarify as I wrote this review, but no.

Two things disappointed me about this final volume.

One was that Lina's crises are not meaningfully returned to. She was a woman with anxiety, this was clear to the reader, but I did think this returning theme of dissolving boundaries would come back together in the final chapters—that she might have thought Tina's boundaries had dissolved, or even that Elena would conclude that Lina's boundaries had finally done. But that would have been a different novel; that would not have been a novel from Elena's point of view. Elena lacks Lina's perspective. She is excluded from it even to the point that this does not occur to her; Elena's final decision is instead to simply force herself to forget about Lina, which of course she can never do. I would find this deeply interesting as a choice if I thought it was deliberate; if the narration indicated in any way this was deliberate. But I have no sense, was given no sense, that it was. Instead it just feels like a lack. The narration was not constructed in a way that allowed this sort of intimation.

The other disappointment was the final section, which loses potency after 1700 pages. The throwback is repeatedly mentioned in this fourth book so it's not unearned, exactly, but if the final 80 pages of this book didn't make the length of the series especially felt already, this throwback did. At the same time, it was quite a fascinating scene—for the reasons mentioned above, that Elena so thoroughly lacks Lina's perspective that she is unable to understand what the final great gesture is or means, but also because of Elena's drawn conclusion that Lina manipulated Elena's point of view when the preceding 1700 pages, being from Elena's POV, are a testament to the opposite. Elena is so deeply unable to generate context about Lina at every turn, and her inability and unwillingness to reflect on this message Lina sent 1700 pages and 60 years ago at the very end of the saga is fundamentally frustrating and underwhelming in every narrative respect. I also found it odd that we spent most of this book during their 30s and 40s and spend almost no time, despite mentions of lovers, with the decades thereafter, as though these years are truly lost because they are less preoccupied with childrearing and -bearing—a frame I would expect a book like this to contradict. But it was too long already. Perhaps I shouldn't complain.

I would like to reread this in about 10 years, with less time between volumes. I think these books are such an achievement, and it may be interesting, on revisit, to read this understanding more explicitly the choice of the author to give us solely Elena's POV and never Lina's. This is effectively a thought experiment about what happens if you take one girl out of an environment and leave another girl in it—I think it is a very interesting exploration of that concept, made less interesting by the fundamental disinterest Elena's narration has in exploring empathy for Lina. Maybe that's another part of the story that I never picked up on, the role empathy does and doesn't play in how this story is told. I feel like I have missed something crucial in this series. I know I will be thinking about it for a long time.