Every once in a while, as a reader, you run into one of those books that is just too big for your mind to entirely take in. It’s not that reading such a book is upsetting or frustrating, but that it is an experience of continuous awe, which can be a little exhausting at times. It is really something to be overwhelmed for hundreds of pages!
You almost wish that the book would occasionally simply whelm you, but of course that’s all that most books do, even good books. And in the same way it’s occasionally clarifying to inch your feet up to the edge of a precipice and take a good look down, it’s quite bracing to come up against the hard edge of your own imagination as you try to pursue a visionary author through the limitless expanse of hers.
