Author: Roger Zelazny
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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Review:

This was a quick read. Then again, I was just finishing "The great book of amber" which is about the size of a phone book and has almost as many characters, so the Torah could have seemed a quick read, too.

This is a gimicky book, and almost every review mentions it: each chapter starts with the main character in Big Trouble (tm) and then he has a flashback that explains how he got there, then he gets away into a cliffhanger, which is resolved in the following chapter's flashback.

Strangely, that is not at all confusing. I am a Zelazny fan, though, and most of his books have a gimmick of some kind. For example, in the first Amber book, the character is amnesiac, so his own past is news to him (as it is for us).

Another nice touch is that while the main character is the classic impossibly erudite scifi hero, there is a reason for that (and it's not "he's a freak"): he has had a 13-year fulltime college education (no degrees yet!).

The flashback trick provides chance for some fun pieces. For example, the protagonist says he is holding a "amolpid" in "ygoloporhtna". Why? Well, we find out about 20 pages later.

I really enjoyed it.