I didn’t enjoy If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller and I feel like I’m missing something

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s a bad book. Obviously the idea is very innovative, obviously the man is great at prose, I’m glad it exists and I don’t even disagree with what I understood to be the fundamental message of the thing, that a single true reality is a lie and we might as well find subjective meaning in falsehood. (Even if I’m not sure that’s a concept I would’ve dedicated an entire novel to, but hey, people have dedicated an entire genre to essentially this, so clearly that’s my own bias.)

So, I’m not doubting its quality. I just got the least possible amount of enjoyment out of reading it, and I’m starting to wonder if there’s something essential I missed because all my friends adored it. To be honest, after the first fifty pages all the book excerpts seemed a bit lacklustre to me (at least from the perspective of them being book openings rather than short stories in their own right) and it didn’t seem very plausible that the protagonist would be so bent on continuing them. The main plot seemed to me to slide into caricature but without embracing its satirical nature the way I would’ve loved to see.

Did you love the book? And if so, can you make me love it too?