rameau's ramblings

I should know better than to trust awards by now. Judges and critics seem to love all things pretentious. Why exactly did I think this would be different?It might have been the idea. That there is a book of universe where all hours--all that was, all that is, all that could be--are written down. That you can change the world by scratching the vellum, spilling the ink, jumping from one page to another. That there is madness in the chaos and that madness has a seed of truth and reason in it if we only look closely enough.Well, I tried and I couldn't find any. I'm giving up at the end of part one and on page 267 of 602. I don't know if everything suddenly makes sense on the last page, because I don't do that. I don't jump to the last page to see if a book will end the way I want it to before deciding to read it. The ending isn't what matters to me, the journey in between the covers is. This reads like something written by and to a schizophrenic. The writing is slow, it switches between first and third person limited and has multiple points of views. The protagonists change names as they change times and phases in their lives. The chapters are long but the paragraphs are too short for any kind of real immersion to the story. Instead being more and more intrigued by the surfacing layers I found myself thrown out of the story time and time again. And finally, it was just too much. Reading Vellum reminded me of reading The Lord of the Rings; I could see the brilliance but I was just too damn bored to fully appreciate it.