It was tough going there for a while, with an unsympathetic narrator who was interested only in himself and might well be shading his memoir to paint himself in the best possible light.  He very much put me in mind of Lolita's Humbert Humbert - an unreliable narrator.  And that was before the Roshomon-like postscripts, where the surviving characters each gave their own version of the events, and you're left to pick and choose which 'truth' to believe.