No # -- Chang and Eng

No # -- Chang and Eng by Darin Strauss  (started 6/14/2011, stopped 6/16/2011)

The concept of this book sounded mildly interesting -- enough for me to purchase it for 25 cents from a clearance rack at my local bookstore.  However, I just couldn't get into the text itself.  The writing is rather stiff and I found myself disliking the narrator from the very beginning.  In addition, the story jumps back and forth through time seemingly at random -- there will be a scene from near the end of the twins' lives, then suddenly the story will jump to their birth, then back to the first scene, and there will be no logical pausing point in the original scene to allow the story to jump.  In addition, the author's forward bothered me: he explained that he originally started the book for its ungrammatical appeal (the first sentence goes back and forth between the singular and plural first person, which frankly is irritating and hard to read). 

Overall: I just did not like the book.  And the main thing I found myself wondering about the twins' lives was not what they had achieved as the first famous Siamese twins, but a) how they had managed to convince two women to marry them, and b) how they had managed to each father more than 10 children. The mechanics and shame factor alone are mind-boggling.  But since those questions were not going to be answered in the first 30 pages or so, I lost interest.  If anyone has had more success reading this book, I'd love to hear about your experience.  The novel has won several awards, so maybe there's something I'm missing.