Melmoth

I got eighty-four pages into this book before I gave up. Nothing really happens in this story: the dull main character reads a collection of unnecessarily detailed personal accounts that supposedly all potentially describe encounters with the mythical Melmoth, a woman doomed to wander the Earth alone until the return of Jesus Christ. In between these accounts, we get glimpses of the main character's ascetic life, transcripts of her dull conversations, and descriptions of her fleeting, half-serious pondering on the possible reality of Melmoth.

The writing is not bad, the descriptions are rather good, but flipping ahead shows that the book continues to go nowhere. A friend of the main character disappears early on, abandoning his disabled wife, but who knows when or whether that will be resolved.