Do not say we have nothing - M. Thien

It puzzles me that this book received so many praises and good reviews - I never really got invested in the story, no matter how terrible the things that happened to its characters were, and I didn’t like the style either.

Shuffling through the passages I marked I realized that they are all quotes from other books. I didn’t know, for example, that David Copperfield had such a nice incipit, and now I really want to read it:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

The book itself is full of this kind of metaphors:

They used foreign words to describe the sound, which made her feel as if the night sky had been slipped into her pocket.

What does this even mean? What am I supposed to understand, or feel, or visualize? Is it just a metaphor meant to sound vaguely lyric, in the hope that nobody would stop and look at it closely?
Of course, if you think enough about it you can come up with something. Maybe it’s just that I prefer just having to read, without the additional job of the periphrasis.

Then there’s the fact one of the main characters is a mathematician, and that I would be very, very, very surprised if the author of this book had a sound knowledge of mathematics. It would become nämlich inspiegabile how such a sentence made its way into the book:

She had an affinity for probability theory and Riemannian symmetric spaces, which she continued to study, neglecting politics and English, which had been her downfall the first time around.

I had the pleasure of reading out loud this sentence to some fellow mathematicians, who seemed to share the idea that you can only write something like this if you don’t have an idea of what Riemannian symmetric spaces are and think that the name sounds cool and complicated. There are several other esternazioni a tema matematica which really shouldn’t have been there, I think.

And that’s really it, I guess. It’s a pity I didn’t manage to get into the book, because the setting - post-revolutionary China - is one I am in principle very interested in.