The edition I read was an abridged version that was around 300 pages. The full book is close to 1300 pages.
This book has some of the longest sentences I've read, and some of most tortured and extravagant syntax I've read. That's awesome because it makes the book so weird and different from everything else. Burton's prose has a lot of strange moves and I'm glad I read it, but it was also a pretty frustrating book for me to spend time with.
I was more attracted to the content, which is just as strange and goes all over the place. I did read an abridged version, but based on what I know about the book it seems like most of it just meanders all over the place, from subject to subject and anecdote to anecdote. It's supposed to be about 'melancholy' but it ends up being about everything. The best way to describe the book is that it's an encyclopedia of European civilization.
It's a funny book...it doesn't read like Tao Lin, but the whole time I was reading it I kept thinking wouldn't it be awesome if one day Tao Lin ended up writing a gigantic rambling 2,000 page book like this. This book reminds me somewhat of the long sentences in Taipei, where every tiny nuance gets qualified, and the qualification gets further parsed into several more qualifications which get dissected down into molecule and atom levels of nuance until they finally resolve themselves in a kind of blurry shrug. (excerpt)
