I've been putting of writing this because I wanted to step back to think more objectively about this. Let's start with what I liked. I felt like the overall feeling of the novel started in a more jovial mood and as we progressed we were exposed more and more to the gruesome nature of war and the corruption and malicious incompetency of those in charge of the troops. I did like the time jumping for this story to help drive home this overall shift in mood. In a chronological sense, bad things were constantly happening; but just as in real life, it can be easier to deal with tragedy and injustice in small doses and as we are forced to continuously endure these wrongs, the negative mental effect grows exponentially. And so in the story, with each new grievance we encounter, we learn about grievances in the past or, in the case of Snowden, increasingly expand on the traumatic nature of that experience. I also tend to enjoy absurd humor so some of the scenes were amusing to me, to a point.
Ok, on to my dislikes. First and foremost, the misogyny and racism. It's more than the character's treatment of women, it's the way the author talks about, and obviously looks down on, women. Women are introduced by what they look like and, even though most of the characters in this book are pretty flat, women are even more so. There are there to be objectified, assaulted, and raped. That's the only contribution of women to the book. I'm not going to continue to rail on the sexism because, based on the comments, you all get it, but I did not like the book because of this. Even the bits of parts that I did like do not redeem this book.
I mentioned I liked the absurd humor to a point and every scene took it waaaaay past the point. The book in general was much longer than it needed to be to get the point across and the excessive repetition was a huge detraction. In general, I'm ok with books that have characters that I don't like and having a unlikeable character can even make a book more engaging, but I did not like a single character in this book and that made this even more unenjoyable for me.
