More like 3. 5 stars.

This took me forever to read. Mostly because I took on this novel just before a massive undertaking: selling our house in Washington, putting all of our stuff into temporary storage, and moving my little family including kids, cats and dogs across the world. We're moving to Spain! The kids are still pretty young and the housing market was pretty decent. The time was right to make a big life change, for no other reason than to live a slower, richer existence, and to improve my Instagram feed (kidding). I'm not quite there yet (still waiting on the visa - ugh) but activity has slowed down enough for me to read again and I started by finishing Couperus' shot at a Hague novel.

This one has a slow, easy going pace. The prose is beautiful and I was never oppressed by the story's rhythm but the effect of so much nothing going on is a bit like Kubrick's use of time in Barry Lyndon. One starts to feel the pace of living among these upper class hallways and ballrooms. Unfortunately, this means Couperus' project, the churning interiority of ruling class dramas, did require a little more generosity on my part as reader than I may have had at times. Oh, the whinging, and the back of the hands pressed against the foreheads, and the tearful sobs because a boy said he liked a girl but she doesn't believe him... come on already.

Mostly I enjoyed this. The prose, as I said, is fantastic, and the characters are very well drawn - their dilemmas usually poignant. It overstays its welcome a bit, in my very humble opinion, but my circumstances in reading weren't entirely fair.