While I loved the first 100 pages, with its reasonably structured narrative - although the generational hops and characters changing names were the sort of challenge I expected reading Chinese fiction - the end of the book was just scattered and barely intelligible. Very disappointing. I guess this is how difficult, say, David Foster Wallace would be in translation. Except that DFW is convincing, whereas the maths and especially cryptography references in this felt like pure nonsense.