I don't really know what to say about this book. Sometimes with a book in translation, you wonder if something gets lost in translation, or if the characters are just so different from you that you can't relate to them. This book was like that. I found it interesting enough, but I didn't really relate to the characters and couldn't understand where they were coming from. I've had this with a lot of the Russians before, particularly Dostoyevsky. The character would react suddenly, yelling or lashing out, and then a minute later, be very calm.

That said, I found the story of the inventor running up huge debts with no way of paying them and the whole family pretending that this was sustainable interesting. But since I couldn't really relate to the characters, I didn't feel invested in the story in a way that would gain the book a higher rating.