Ok, I tried to read this book three times, I guess, and abandoned it halfway. The first time it was the Romanian translation, I found it weak and thought I'd like the book better in English. And it is a bit better, only slightly. The writing is... crude for lack of a better word. Superficial. Sure, it works *after a while*, but you have to get through the tedium before you actually get to enjoy the building of Philip Marlowe, the pulp detective, later portrayed by Bogart opposite Bacall.

The plot is incredibly convoluted. The biggest problem is that far from being a plot-based mystery, as one would expect, it's an atmospheric magical detective thriller - everything is tense, the detective uses magic to solve a case that wasn't handed to him, things just happen and if you put everything back to back it will end up with more questions than answers. It's not boring, though, although the writing is on the lower corners of mediocre.

But there are things that caught my eye and made me think. I kind of liked the book, I only wish it was more coherent and it made at least *a bit* of sense. I like Philip Marlowe, the magical-private-eye resulting from this book. But the book is badly written, it feels like Chandler tried to oversell his book, he tried to write to impress, but lacked the quality, and it shows.

One thing about the title: The Big Sleep is not what happens when you try to go through page after page of nonsensical „detective work”, but it seems it is a metaphor for death. For some reason, that makes sense, I guess it's a throw-away line at the end.

And that's how it took me more than 14 months to read this book. In the end I read the Romanian translation, which is unfortunate because the translator made the boring choice of using a lot of archaic words, as well as making some very strange choices (and completely missing the tone of some lines).