Almost every time I picked up this book to read it, I fell asleep. Now that may be a coincidence, but it's certainly not an endorsement.

Umbrella tells the story of Audrey Death, a munitions worker during the Great War, who contracts a brain disease and is confined to a lunatic asylum in a state of catatonia. The other key character is Dr Zack Busner, the psychotherapist who is treating her decades later.

The book is written as one continuous stream; there are no chapters and few paragraph breaks. Self frequently shifts his narrative to a different time, setting and protagonist in the middle of a sentence. I often found myself re-reading a page a couple of times to figure out what he was on about now. This is made worse by his repeatedly chucking in italicised words and phrases to no discernable purpose.

I suppose this is all supposed to represent the chaos going on inside Audrey's diseased mind but it is really irritating. The book is almost 400pp already; it doesn't need to be made any more verbose. Self's narrative is simply not interesting enough to put up with these mannerisms.

There is the germ of a good story here, but this Self-indulgent writing style has turned it into a snooze-fest - in my case literally. ( )

This book is not accessible at all. It’s like reading a different language.
It’s annoying because I love the way he paints a picture, but it’s so difficult to read. No chapters or paragraphs, switching between narrative and thoughts of different people and time periods in one sentence. You don’t know where one starts and another begins. It’s incredibly hard work.
I think sometimes he deliberately tries to be impenetrable, like he's challenging the reader to keep up with him. Which isn’t good story telling. It’s a way of saying ‘I’m cleverer than you, if you can crack this book you might enjoy it, but you have to decode it first’.
I stuck with it because I always finish a book, but the first half was painful to read, the second half once I grasped how he wrote, was VERY SLIGHTLY easier. It just seems like he’s trying to prove a point that he’s cleverer than us, like he’s used thesaurus on every word and it’s stopped making sense. I don’t think he writes for us, I think he writes to show off to other writers.
I’m sure if it made sense with correct punctuation it would be a great book. I understood about 60% of it. I only gave it more than one star because what I actually understood, could have been a great emotive story. Though the confusion of the writing took from that. ( )

(Original Review, September 30th 2012)

And people are entertained by different things. Some people are entertained by cat videos. Others are entertained by football or motor racing. Others are entertained by mathematical or philosophical problems. Others are entertained by jigsaw puzzles or their literary equivalents. Others are entertained by sophisticated use of narrative technique. Some people may be entertained by all of these: they have rich mental lives, with varying sources of entertainment.

What made Umberto Eco's Il Nome della Rosa / The Name of the Rose such a great novel was that it combined so many types of entertainment: detective thriller, historical novel, literary allusions as a puzzle, psychological novel, a bit of sex, lots of violence and horror, discourses on philosophy and mediaeval aesthetics, and more. Readers could read it on the level appropriate for them; and if you could appreciate several levels, so much the better.

There is an absolute place for literature that is complex and hard but you have to then question the purpose of an award. Should the booker prize be to transcend excellent enjoyable books to the mass market (rewarding the author / publisher and ultimately the reader). Or should it be to reward a small elitist group of reviewers and showcase their views?

Personally I feel this year is more about the latter than the former.

In the case of Self it was revenge; it was intravenously injecting the psychotic rarefied "heights" of the imperial British and European elite's academy with a heavy overdose of their own medicine. What was the point? ( )

All that I understood with reading a few pages of this book is there is an asylum, a doctor, a mental patient and... and... wait did I get this information by reading the blurb!!!
Totally, I might NOT have understood what was this book was about. Maybe I am dumb. May be the book is DUMBER!! We just didn't get along. ( )

Didn't finish. I admire a book of this popularity taking risks with form and being a bit experimental; credit to the Booker shortlist for including it.

But for me, it's just not well done. Stream-of-conciousness is where every teenage creative writer starts - it's hard to do well, and setting it in a psychiatric hospital is just inviting comparison to the worst excesses of angsty adolescent individualism. For me, there's not enough here to elevate this novel above that level, particularly when Self's obsession with long and technical vocabulary masks any actual emotional complexity that would do so.

Only read 60 pages or so, so only a partial assessment. ( )