This unclassifiable book is essentially a novel, one is to accept. It differs (not to get too musty in allusions) essentially from ""Don Quixote,"" the first novel, in that it never seems that Cervantes actually SEES his two characters who remain ciphers around whom jokes and anecdotes are accumulated. Neither does one feel does Joseph Conrad, he who wrote that the novelist's prime responsibility is to see. Writes this novel's narrator, ""Compared to snow storms in Canada and typhoons in Japan humans are microbial agents. In our next novel, detailed this shall be with pinpointed contrasts and parallels, done very subtly. But we may not find publication as easily as we have so far, since that future novel will be built on logic that cannot be escaped. But the most important question now is whether we will ever finish this novel.""