Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I tried. I worked. I read and read. I thought about it. I stuck it out and I finished the dratted thing, like the good little ex-Catholic guilty girl I guess that I am. Yet I have NO IDEA what it's supposed to mean, or what it's about, or why in heck it won the vaunted Man Booker prize. Eleanor Catton is a very skilled writer, as is evident from the first eloquent page. But I feel like she's writing to show off how good she is, how complicated she can make a story, and her admittedly research skills. I'm impressed with her fortitude, but in the end, I don't feel anything except kind of stupid for not understanding it, and for sticking it out when I clearly wasn't going to. Why all the astrological references and chapter headings? Why all of those male characters, utterly without charm, and their long dissertations about gold and australia. Why the icky bad guy couple with absolutely no redeeming qualities that might make them more interesting for readers? Why the endless elaborate "reveals" of details of when various events happened when I don't care a bit about WHAT happened, and less about the people it may or may not have happened to? Why the several lumbering plot twists that are telegraphed for 30 pages before they finally occur. No surprises, no characters i cared about in the least. Was my kindle edition missing critical pages? Did skipping the introduction mean I was doomed to flounder through the book like a 7-year-old reading the Sound and the Fury? And the final insult is that the mystery is never quite solved at the end of the 800 pages. I don't quite know what happened. Not much, as far as I can tell. I have read extremely long novels---love tolstoy, dickens, brontes, etc. This book is sort of trying to do that, but in a modern way, where nothing happens, or rather, the same series of not very interesting events is re-examined from multiple points of view. It's a great cure for insomnia.....other than that, if you're not obsessed with the Australian gold rush or astrology, I'd skip this one.