I read your excerpt and I see what you mean about strong emotions. Robert's passion was so deep it blinded him and he became monomaniacal. The reader is drawn into the. maelstrom of his obsession and awed by the images of a beautifully completed illustrated manuscript. Your writing has all the simple elegance of Steinbeck's book, The Pearl and reminds me of that work.

It's interesting in a way because there's a fine line between style and content. Nabakov often says style is all that matters and some writers feel justified if they have a good yarn to spin and produce a pot-boiler. But creating fear, and pity or pathos always impacts readers.