It is indeed a strange book. A young lieutenant is sent to a remote post in the Tartar frontier. At first, he hates it and wants to leave at any cost. Then he succumbs to the place's secret: some sort of masochism that acts like a drug, distorting the lieutenant's sense of time and consuming his life. Thirty years painfully fly, and then something happens. Theme and style are oddly alike in this book: you read and read and nothing happens, and yet it's fascinating. Slow as the book is, you breeze through it. In a stupor, you reach a beautiful ending, of which I am not going to tell you.