Less

Beautifully written, and I kept wanting to pick it up and come back to it, so I'm not quite sure why I didn't connect better with this book. Perhaps reading about other people traveling just isn't in my jam; I could appreciate Less's exploits, but the parts I loved were less about the traveling, more about Less's relationships over long years; not even chronologically, but getting to see them unfold over time and through the context of other relationships.

I didn't necessarily know/believe/care that Freddy was the narrator all along. Seemed like a weak device; it really wouldn't have mattered at all to me if the narrator was never named, just someone who had been on the periphery of Less's life all along, one of the Russian Whatevers Group. And I had read that this was a love story before I began, but I would consider it more of a series of love stories recalled, and didn't find the ending particularly necessary; it would have been better if Freddy hadn't married Tom at all and had stuck around for Less to get back (which is where I thought Carlos was going with his talking to Less, regarding the night before the wedding), or if Freddy had gone through with the wedding and stuck with Tom because he actually wanted to. But there's a lot about the relationships in this book that I could appreciate, even if I didn't understand or agree with the ways in which they played out. And right towards the end, I thought the love story was going to be Robert after all.