I was puzzled by this book. At the start, it was really interesting and it seemed to be going somewhere. The story is engaging up to maybe 60%, but afterwards... I just kept skipping. All the talk about god knows what, you start wondering whether you're either just you stupid for the book, or maybe there is little point of them talking about the weird lawyer philosophy, maybe? The format switches between two perspectives in time every several pages - it also switches between first and third person, and it really bothered me. Constant back and forth between legalese and action scenes really bothered me. By the end things went into total absurd mode and I had trouble picking out what was really going on.

Anyway though, the novel is based on the absurd and that was interesting. The main character Muzhduk is used as a way to show us our own culture is an alien thing. To expose our daily nonsenses and systems which are otherwise too hard to notice. The rigidity of our society and our laws and rules. At the same time, Muzhduk is both the sides of your archetypal fool - he's silly like the youngest brother in a fairytale, searching for some mythological gold. But he is also incredibly smart, like the fools that were supposedly the advisors of kings. It's a very interesting symbolic type of character.

In short, this might be a really good book for literary analysis, for the layers upon layers of meaning in it, but it's just not a very fun story to read. The law lingo makes it all the harder, cause if you haven't been to Harvard, you might end up feeling like you're not reading English anymore, some of the times. It's a challenge to uncover what this book was really going for, and I respect those who do, but I also feel like these will be few.

I thank the publisher for giving me a free copy in exchange for my honest review.

The Ugly by Alexander Boldizar makes for an interesting read. Muzhduk the Ugli the Fourth is a absolutely huge mountain man from Siberia who decides to tackle the last mountain, "Harvard Law School" in order to claim back what a dishonest American lawyer has stolen. Muzduk will use words as weapons instead of large boulders.
What follows is a hilarious journey that takes Muzhduk from his home in the mountains to Africa to the "wilds" of an American campus. The book has a very dry humor but I did find myself having to put the book down from time to time because I found the writing to be a bit too dry and I needed to take a break with something lighter. It is a very good book though and really worth a read through to the end.
I received a copy of this book from the publishers via Netgalley for free in exchange for an honest review.

This is a thoroughly original story, intelligent and quite funny in places, and Muzhduk the Ugli the Fourth is a charismatic lead character. I very much enjoyed the first half of the book, as Muzhduk begins his journey to reach Harvard to learn to fling words instead of boulders and win back his ancestral home which has literally been sold from under him. It satirises modernity, masculinity, education (and the American legal system in particular).

However the further I progressed through the book the less I enjoyed it. This could be less an issue with the book and more my personal preference that satire be brief and punchy. I had gotten the formula by then, and so I felt it dragged (although it's entirely possible that for lawyers, the latter part of the book is more compelling). I would recommend this book to fans of Joseph Heller and John Kennedy Toole - or indeed anyone planning on becoming a lawyer in America