I was expecting a bit more of this. While each of the individual stories was really nice, and not too heavy on the morality (although some had more than others), the structure of the book caused me to forget what was happening in the more disconnected sections. If there was some over-arching theme, I think I may have missed it. The birthmark carried by the characters, as well as the fact that the title was dropped into each section at least once did not seem to be enough to tie everything together.

However, with one really heavy handed exception, the stories were well plotted, and exciting to read. More of a action adventure sci-fi book then any master work of postmodern fiction (I don't know where I got the idea that it would be that).

-- edit...

On reading other reviews, it seems that there were a number of details that I missed in the meta narrative, however I am not sure that even those tie the work into an expression of anything beyond some tricky literary devices. I think that the thing that left me feeling flat was that whatever idea or core these devices were meant to hold up felt bare bones. This is perhaps due to the fact that the author focused on blockbuster style tricks to create drama, and big silly reveals to shock, rather than growing the tension naturally.

One thing that I did notice in the structure is that the nesting naturally created an extremely hard to deal with build, as each cliffhanger moved to a setup on the way into the book. On the way out of the book, because it was resolution after resolution, it was an extremely easy read. I wonder if he borrowed this structure from television, one week you watch all the "to be continued..." and the next week you watch all the "last time on...".