This is quite probably the most nonlinear narrative I have ever experienced - with the possible exception of the movie Pulp Fiction. The most central character in the story, the one that everything hinges on, dies in the first scene of the book... but it's OK, because large sections of it are told in flashback. The scene where he dies is told from different perspectives several times throughout the book. There is an apocalyptic flu epidemic that nearly wipes out the human race, and often you are hopscotching back and forth before and after the epidemic within pages. It's not a book you can passively read, at least not if you are trying to catch all of the connections. You have to keep your eyes open and spot objects like the paperweight, the comic books, the dog(s) named "Luli" in the different contexts in which they appear, and connect the dots for yourself. I thought it was fun to try to guess those things, but there is also a melancholy thread throughout, as would be expected in a book about the aftermath of a flu pandemic. 
 I did enjoy the book. It is quite unusual, in that it has very little to say about the period immediately after the pandemic when the world is in a nightmare of chaos. One of the main characters, in fact, does not remember the entire year after the flu at all, and the author seems to want us to know as little about it as the character does. In the end, that's fine, because it's a book not about the chaos, but about the recovery of human culture afterwards. Have you ever read a post-apocalyptic story about a traveling orchestra-slash-Shakespeare troupe? That's the kind of book this is. In the end, the good parts of pre-flu culture survive, both on a macro level (view spoiler)[(electric lights in a town on the other end of a telescope?) (hide spoiler)] and a micro level (view spoiler)[(a character recognizes in the comic books an event he attended before the flu) (hide spoiler)]. It is these details that make this a book with a redemptive theme. So I can't fault the sadness, because the human race does indeed begin to bounce back at the end.