It's still amazing. Suttree is such a fully realized and complicated character that he remains compelling after multiple reads. His story is epic and his meditations on death as well as his many encounters with it are so real and heart wrenching that to me they become the main focus of the novel. Mankind is surrounded by the specter of death at all times, yet despite of this, or perhaps because of it, man pursues life with everything at our disposal. It is beautiful, devastatingly sad, boisterous, rude, crude, and bursting at the seams with humor. Truly this book is a triumph.